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Environmental Ethics: Amartya Sen’s Philosophical Concept of Environmental Justice
Observing the need for a transcendental world view of the environmental ethics, Amartya Sen writes:
- “Environmental sustainability has typically been defined in terms the preservation and
enhancement of the quality of human life,” (The Idea of Justice, 2009, p. 148).
- “Take adequate care of the environment around us,” (p. 48).
- “Take an adequately capacious view of humanity.” (p. 250).
Amartya Sen’s above-noted statements remind us of Robert Calasso’s (Ardor, 2014) observation
that seers during the Rig Vedic period not only wanted to think, but wanted to be aware of thinking.
Thomas Merton and George Santayana write that liberalism, communism, capitalism are doomed to
exhaustion. Santayana, who charts the destinies of Calvinism and “transcendentalism,” contends in a
skeptic mode that material “optimism is often compensatory.”1 Sen elaborates this compensatory notion
of transcendental argument to argue that the conservation approach emerges not only from the possibility
of competing principles but the assessment of justice as well.2 Classical moral philosophy appears to be a
normative activity that investigates, criticizes and establishes in order to conclude that it is not about what
people happen to think about preservation of nature but about what people ought to think about. To accept
science in environmental ethic as the last word is to overlook that which made science possible: the mind
itself.3 Henry David Thoreau (“Walden,” 1836) argues that foundational transcendence regards nature not
only beautiful in any aesthetic sense, but also a representation of divine power, thereby arguing for a bond
in relationship between nature and human environment that is being degraded by man.
Knowing that transcendentalism in general wants to reclaim the hidden power of human soul as a
solution to man-made environmental degradation, Sen conforms to the foundational ideas of
transcendental philosophy and epistemology. He reclaims the power and extra-ordinary beauty of nature,
knowing that many traditional practices, though essentially environmentally friendly, are inspired by
controversial “moral economy.” I would argue that by examining the persistent demand for the means to
environmental justice affecting social justice as well, being his core idealized emotional motivation in
life, Sen fruitfully analyzes the difficult issue in proportionationality that reconciles the dilemma between
his pet expansive theory of agency’s “autonomous power” and capability for a rational composite notion
in defense of his moral principles for the restoration of a balanced principle for the sustainability of
nature. His is a quest for transcendence that is behind the philosophical/ethical world view, largely
conforming well to ideas of Kant, Schopenhauer, Emerson, Thoreau, Yeats, Kalidas and Tagore, who
reinforce the moral imagination to bridge the gap between real and empathetic intuitions. Can that
imagination be presented as objectively as a rationalist would like to have? After all, valid knowledge
with its variations in purity, Cartesian dualism, and transcendental phenomenology, poses problems to
philosophers who know that American transcendentalist pioneers injected slavery and social injustice into
their moralizing values. It can be, however, safely concluded that currently environmental ideology
largely ignores that humans with virtue ethic in the equation that defends the truth theory of knowledge,
referring to the empirical reality as well as adhering to experiencing transcending intuition.
Statement of the Problem
1 George Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” David Hollinger and Charles Capper (eds.),
The American Intellectual Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press1997), pp.94-112. 2 Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press2009), p. 15.
3 Raymond Tallis, Aping Makind (New York: Acumen, 2011), pp. 341-347.
2
Existing distributive justice in the use of environmental impacts is necessary but not adequate in
order to promote environmental justice.4 Often too much interests are shown with understanding “farming
communities” and their agricultural systems within their specific environments (Stephen Ellis, “Of
Elephants and Men,” March 1994). Beck argues that “threats from civilization are bringing about a new
kind of ‘shadow kingdom’ comparable to the realm of the gods and demons in antiquity, which, it seems,
is hidden behind the visible world and, as such, threatens human life on “this Earth.”5 He maintains that
scientific/economic “progress” in management is overshadowed by forms of risk produced by the very
processes involved in such progress.6 How to balance the African practice of implanting, for instance,
more and more trees with the current widespread planting of exotic species for commercial prosperity? In
Kenya, rural subsisting hunting came to be erroneously termed as “poaching,” thereby setting in motion
social/political processes of the gradual removal of indigenous decision-making institutions through
westernized state wildlife conservation policies and programs (Callicott, 1996, 2001; Akama, 1998;
Palmer, 2003).7 Thus, distributive justice fails to direct the empathetic bond joining two separate but
essential united destiny of man and natural object.
In this debate about possibility, a major barrier to a transcendental argument is the possibility of a
“pantheistic God,” who is self-conscious and reflexively self-referring without, in the process, needing to
grant ethical status to others, or even to recognize others as I’s.8 Moreover, many philosophical problems
are different guises of the problem of the relation of universal to particular, argues Roberto Unger.9 Purely
allocational or distributive paradigms ignore the “I” in the “institutional contexts.” In Sen’s meaning of
context, the fundamental object of analysis, as for Skinner, is what is called the “text in context.” The
recovery of such contexts permits us to study the relationship between the social and rhetorical change,
and the way terms that are both descriptive and evaluative as well as to foster transformation in social
perceptions.10
This justification for the linkage between the subject, environment, and what can be
proved, i.e., social justice, can be made by the knowledge step in the inference. There are three-fold
imaginative recreations of ethical possibilities that go beyond the bare sociology-based ethical rules and
their imaginative possibilities: (a) Those that are generally available in the agent’s context; (b) those that
agents could reasonably have been expected to believe themselves to have; and (c) those that the agents
actually believed themselves to have. These three are the usual such-and-such possibilities.11
4 Robert Paul Wolf, Understanding Rawls (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 199-207.
5 U. Beck, Ecological Politics in the Age of Risk (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), p.72.
6 B. Whyne, “May the Sheep Safely Graze? A Reflexive View of Expert-Lay Knowledge Divide,” in S. Las, B.
Szersyznski and B. Wyne (eds.), Risk, Environment and Modernity: Towards a New Ecology (London: Sage, 1996), pp. 44-83. 7 Santosh Saha, “Indigenous Environmental Principles and Resource Management System in Sub-Saharan Africa,”
Journal of Australian Association for Environmental Education, Charles Darwin University (July 2008), pp. 38-49. 8 Robert Nozik, Philosophical Explanations, pp. 54, 65; David E. Copper, World Philosophies: An Historical
Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), pp. 102-103. 9 Roberto Unger, Knowledge and Politics (New York: Free Press, 1975), pp. 133-144.
10 Q. Skinner, Visions of Politics: Regarding Method, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), see
Jonardon Ganeri, “Contextualism in the Study of Indian Intellectual Culture,” Journal of Indian Philosophy, vol. 36 (2008), pp. 551-556. 11
John Kekes, “Moral Imagination: Freedom, and the Humanities,” APQ, pp.102-103. It is a central concept in Hume, Kant, Romantic thinkers as well as Indian Transcendental philosophers, and poets. Sudhdaseel Sen, writing from a Western perspective, investigates how European composers have set to music poems (songs) by Rabindranath Tagore. The quality of Tagore’s poems is not the issue, but the impact of composers’ European cultural assumptions about the Oriental imagination, the exotic, the “other” on their strictly musical imagination that S. Sen chooses to analyze in fine cultural-historical detail. Alexander Zeminsky’s Symphony, the most elaborate and most faithful to Tagore’s sentiments that Tagore himself actually heard performed in Prague in
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Consequently, appreciating and understanding significance cannot be merely cognitive, it must
necessarily have a larger “affective component” capable of conveying the appeal to the relevant
possibilities had for the agent involved and engaged in most conservation principles. To what extent
justice is transcendental?
The ethical problem refers to the issue that says epistemology ought to focus on other mental
states, such as understanding. Environmental ethics and justice affirm that bio-centrism or eco-centrism
need to be coupled with the appeal to a kind of holism to valuing nature as a whole, rather than parts, such
as human beings. This is self-awareness with introspective awareness appearing as an interior urge, an
empathic experience, and a mental state. Two facets of empathy namely empathic concern for others and
apparent distress at the pain of the other entities are especially relevant in this context of duty ethics. In
environmental justice, ethics and values have guided the Indian moral inclinations since ancient times.
Zahavi and others argue that “embodiment” and inter-subjective empathy are two aspects of the same
essential being-in-the-world.12
Talia Welsh considers this interpretation as problematic, because one can
easily conceive of a being who shows what has been argued for as an embodied self, but who does not
display a sense of self and other-awareness (e.g., Non-human animal kingdom are in this category).13
Indian transcendentalist thinkers, including Kabir, Sri Aurobindo, Kalidas, Rabindranath Tagore
and Raja Ram Mohan Roy, face a dilemma in attaching values to natural objects as well as humans. As
we ask, “Why grass seems to be greener?” the next step in our “thinking” comes from Daniel Kahneman
(Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2001), who posits that “system 2” in our mind psychologically monitors the
output of “system 1” and overrides it when the result conflicts with logic. Kahneman and his scientific
partner, the late Amos Tversky, demonstrate that we are not nearly as rational as we like to believe. Some
conflict resolution analysts and practitioners of ethics (Jan Narveson, ed., Moral Issues, 1983; Marshall
Cohen, Thomas Nagel, and Thomas Scanlon, eds., Equality and Preferential Treatment, 1977), insist that
people of different cultures are driven by certain basic “universal philosophical” concepts to satisfy
human needs and demands for social justice without paying much attention to environmental ethics for an
equitable treatment of the needs of man and nature.
However, the moral quest is how should we arrange our working systems of economy and
technology to ensure sustainability of the Earth?14
This is an anxiety that is being reflected in
Hemingway’s (The Old Man and the Sea) message that projects that old man, the fish and sea are at times
in conflict but mostly live in amity; transcendence means which implies that “The Enlightenment” may be
shorthand for many different hidden enlightenments. In this relationship between nature and man, there is
a demand for equal treatment, but “equality” does not mean equivalence and difference here is not
deficiency. Transcendence stands for our imaginations of “moral economy, and thus, in Africa, the
Swahili words, utani, chama, ujana, and ujamaa convey not about simple farm management but also
social relations, which consider economic and cultural consideration in preservation of nature. “Moral
economy” is not traditional indigenous norm per se, as alleged, but is the norm created in response to
1926, see O. Joseph and O Kathleen, “Rabindranath Tagore as Cultural Icon,” University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 77 (2014), p.57. David E. Copper, World Philosophies: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), pp. 102-103.
12 D. Zahavi, “Beyond Empathy: Phenomenological approaches to Inter-subjectivity,” Journal of Consciousness
Studies, vol. 8, nos. 5-7 (2010), pp. 151-167. 13
Talia Welsh, “Primal Experience in Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy and Psychology,” Radical Psychology, vo. 6, no. 1 (2007). 14
Julie Davidson, “Sustainable Development: Business as Usual or a New Way of Lining?” Paper at the Centre for Environmental Studies (University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, 2001); Mark A. Lutz and Kenneth Lux, Humanistic Economics: The New Challenge (New York: Bootstrap Press, 1988), pp. 316-317.
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external forces, such as harsh climate, bad governments and more specifically, exploiting economy and
as it applies to things or on-persons in the religious texts.15
Secular technological progress has been seen
as the key to moral progress in sustainable development, but that also tends to reinforce aspects of the
lower human self, that is as Sen posits, the utilitarian, making and doing, self-interested, egoistic aspects
at the expense of the ethical, altruistic and transparent self. As Hanas Jones writes, “This functional
feedback of functional necessity and reward assumes the increasing ascendency of one side of man’s
nature over all others, and inevitably at the other’s expense.”16
This is stumbling on happiness, because
we systematically overestimate the degree to which good and bad experiences affect us.17
Counteracting the Prevailing Norms by Transcendental Values
By 1858, London’s Thames was overflowing with human waste, and the British institutional
measures ignored the problems because of the lack of social clarity, or sheer lack of appreciation. Lutz
and Lux argue that the neglect of ethical issues resulted in an accumulating legacy of crisis and disaster.18
In transcendental message, Pope Francis, in his recent teaching encyclical (2015), speaks in the language
of secular conservation principle, highlighting a moral dilemma because the current “development”
oriented policies have profound impact on both nature and the poor. He suggests that we unethically turn
to geo-engineering instead of hoping that humans will start reducing their carbon use. Even if believing
truly is a mental state in some liberal sense of the term, there is still a more reasonable sense in which
believing truly is not a mere mental state but a combination of a mental state with some non-mental
condition. Russel calls the principle as “the fundamental epistemological principle” in the analysis of
propositions containing descriptions.19
With the same motivation but with a different methodology, the
philosopher Ramanuja argues that devotional love is directed not toward a supreme power (Brahma) but
toward being with whom we can experience intimacy.20
We need, he adds, to combine the two
perspectives into a vision of “identity-in-difference,” of the natural world and our world. What Pope
Francis is arguing is that fossil fuels are the moral choice for the world. In the same vein, Sen argues that
we cannot take preferences as given independently of the debate about conservation that affects our social
choice policy, which, he insists, has a transcendental virtue ethic. Sen’s concern is to frame a view of how
we often act so that if we act that way our value is not threatened. Is economic determinism compatible
with such a conception? Sen observes that conservation crisis stems from implementing developmental
policy instead of counteracting the effects of greenhouse gas induced global warming, adding new
experimental uncertainty to our planet’s already changing climate. Theories of this type usually have a
developmental component built into them, for those most fully human capacities are ones that are not
mastered at birth or automatically expressed by instinct, but must be developed by interaction with others,
and practice over the course of a life-time. To that extent, then, the individuals continue to grow and
develop throughout their live, the quality of life is enhanced.
15
Cited in Veena Das, “Tradition, Pluralism, Identity: Framing the Issues,” in Veena Das et al. (eds.), Tradition, Pluralism and Identity: In Honor of T.N. Madan (New Delhi: Sage Books, 1999), pp.1-7. 16
Hans Jonas, “Philosophical Reflections on Experimenting with Human Subjects, “Ethics in Perspectives,” in K.J. Struhl and P.R. Struhl (eds.), New York: Random House, 1975), pp. 242-353. 17
D.T. Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (New York: A.A. Knopf, 2006). 18
Mark A. Lutz and Kenneth Lux, Humanistic Economics: The New Challenge (New York: Bootstrap Press, 1988), pp. 316-318. 19
B.A. Russell, “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 11 (1910-11), pp. 108-128. 20
Ramanuja rejects the notion of complete identity between brahman and the individual selves. The individual selves are finite and cannot be identical to the brahman in every respect. See Ramanuja, Trantrahasya: A Primer of Prabhakara Mimamsa (Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1956); J.N. Mahanty, Classical Indian Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), pp. 89-90.
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As B. K. Matilal expresses a fairly common view of the Indian tradition when he observes:
“Professional philosophers of India over the last two thousand years have been consistently concerned
with the problems of logic and epistemology, meta-physics and soteriology, and sometimes they have
made very important contributions to the global heritage of philosophy. But, except some cursory
comments and some insightful observations, the professional philosophers of India have very seldom
discussed what we call ‘moral philosophy’ today.”21
Ranganathan (2007) expands this by arguing that
dharma should not be defined in terms of its referents but rather in terms of the intention with which it
us used. In his terminology, a term can be defined either by its typical extension, its typical referents, or
by the typical intention with which the term is used, or combined thereof. The burden of proof is on the
intentionalist in this kind of case. The discourse, questions, judgments, inferences and arguments are
relevant to decide whether ethic is being used as the conventional moral term.
In the Yoruba religious/transcendental moral view, the land is a divine phenomenon with celestial
status and agriculture is a divine occupation originated by a woman called Orisa-oko. There it is
forbidden to cut certain trees, appropriate rituals of propitiation must be observed thereby providing a
spiritual check. Their beliefs are results of “deliberate instruct the ecological behavior of a community’s
spiritual value system. This is, as Saha insists, a non-romantic view of the Sub-Saharan indigenous
resource management.22
In Emerson’s understanding, the mental world is primary in comparison to the
physical world, which is secondary.
Transcendence as experience suggests that subjective/objective, internal/external must be
considered complementary ways of knowing, as both are required to describe reality. Plato, believed to
have conceived the concept of transcendentalism, argued that goodness could be perceived only through
intuition and insight, instead of logic or rationality. Emerson used this theory to contended that spirit
could improve the theory of correspondence. Kant, in his Theory of Knowledge, considered a distinction
between the world of sense and that of understanding; transcendental knowledge could be viewed as a
possible priori. The transcendental values have different values depending on the context. It passes
through several strains leading to interconnected environment and social justice. During the 1830s to the
late 1840s growing out of a divide in the American Unitarian church, which grew out of the desire to
negate Lockean thinking in ill-defined “natural law,” favoring the socially privileged. Locke argues that
religious perception is material and not an idealistic process that may not transcend the physical world.
The mainstream transcendentalism was also influenced by the Romantic Movement in Europe during the
American and French revolutions. For Emerson (Nature, 1836), nature is the material world, which is
one-half of the greater realm. Diverse transcendentalists, such as Emerson and Thoreau of the US, the
Enclopedists in France, the Wiemer-Jena Romanticists in the 1780s-1810, the Green circle of Balliol
College, Oxford, all have one thing in common – transcendence “inference.” As with the problem of
justification, the central issue in transcendental inference and rationality is not how we judge whether
what we claim to be an explanation is true, but whether, granting that it is true, it really does explain what
it proposes to explain. One implication of this would be that no one would gain knowledge just by
believing something that happened to be true.
Donald and Werhane present this type of consequentialism as a “teleological” system, and any
ethical theory which stresses excellence will also be teleological in another more classical sense, for it
will stress the object, end, or goal of moral action. Ethicists, who stress virtue ethics, do simply identify
more clearly the agenda for a coherent debate over moral issues. This transcendental virtue is far from
21
B.K. Matilal, cited in Shyam Ranganathan, Ethics and the History of Indian Philosophy (Delhi: Matilal, 2007). 22
Santosh C. Saha, “Indigenous Environmental Principles and Resource Management System in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Journal of Australian Association, p. 39.
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religious ethics, which codify practices as being religious and morally required.23
Thus, Sen suggests that
by destroying the public sphere in which abstract truths are established and can be tested and by reducing
the human world to an inlet of the biosphere, scientists as well as Darwinitics have taken away the very
place where objective knowledge could arise and be known. Darwin incorrectly informs us, argues John
Gray,24
that our minds are subordinated to the need for survival; we are not yet committed to discovering
the objective truth. But Darwinian selection does not operate on a full menu of possible variations, but
only on the short list of actual variation that occurs.25
It is for this reason that we need to look to the
discipline that has concerned itself with trying to understand the nature, basis of knowledge, in short,
philosophy. In Ken Wilber’s scheme, the “Self” is to be transcended, and object relations and attachment
to people, ideas, and one’s own sense of self and path in natural life are to be abandoned in favor of
attaining higher states of consciousness through the stages of contemplative evolution.26
It is in the nature of telos in which virtues must be understood as internal to various social
practices, and as such forms the essence of our knowledge. Martha Nussbaum clarifies by arguing that
Sen’s theory of capability has its legacy in ancient Indian transcendental philosophy, which believed that
all human beings are manifestations of Brahma. In that sense, everyone should have equal rights and
access to all privileges and capabilities in society. By mentioning Brahma, we need not suggest that the
theory of capability has its origins in metaphysics. Indeed, Nussbaum, Sen and even Rawls argue that the
theory of primary goods and social justice have strong reservations against metaphysics. Sri Aurobindo
and Rabindranath Tagore resolve the conflict between metaphysics and rationality.27
Tagore fosters a
mutually understandable discourse for addressing basic human concerns sensitized by the poet-educator’s
insights and ways of expressing cultural and environmental challenges in modern time. His man-under-
nature responses promotes environmental degradation because the subjects here attribute the process to
physical or supernatural phenomena believed to be beyond local human control. Man-over-nature
responses could promote degradation because of over-zealous application of technology to conquer nature
or overcome its many constrains. In this vein, Saranindra Tagore develops Tagore’s concept of humanity
as transcendental cosmopolitanism, which resolves the issue between cultural pluralism and
environmental norms.28
However, Edmund Gettier (1963) argues that there are situations in which one’s
belief may be justified as true, and yet fail to count as knowledge. The Indian philosopher B.K. Matilal
draws on the Navya-Nyaya (New Reason) fallibilism tradition to respond the Gettier problem. Nyaya
theory distinguishes between “know p and know that one knows p,” these two are different. The question
of justification arises only at the second level, when one considers the knowledge-hood of the acquired
belief.29
Thus, in summary, in environmental ethics, we face a new ethical dilemma. Both humans and
beaver make dams, but the beaver’s dam is a standardized species-wide imperative, whereas human dams
are the product of argument, effort, imagination, domination, evolving technology, ingenuity, and
perseverance. For some, an overwhelming case for feeling obliged to “see through” our differences from
higher primate to an underlying identity comes from the fact that we share more than 98 per cent of our
23
William Hawk and Gerald Schlabach, “A Short Primer on Ethical Theory,” http://courseweb.stthomas.ed/gwschlabach/docs/ethicsprmer.htm (accessed 5/7/2013). See also Donaldson and Proceedings Werner, p. 3tel. 24
John Gray, Beyond New Right: Markets: Government and the Common Environment (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 78. 25
Peter Lipton, Inference to the Best Explanation (London: Routledge, 199), p. 150. 26
K. Wilber, The Spectrum of Consciousness (Wheaton, Illinois: Theosophical Publishing House, 1979). 27
Ashmita Khasnabis, Negotiating Capability and Diaspora: A Philosophical Politics (Lanham, MD: Lexington Book, 2014), pp. 10-12, 15-16, 55, 58, 22-24. 28
Joseph T. O’Connell and M. Kathleen O’Connell, “Rabindranath Tagore as ‘Cultural Icon’,” University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 77, issue 4 (Fall 2008), pp. 1-7. 29
he Free Encyclopedia, “Epistemology,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology,” (accessed 9/20/2013).
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genes with the chimpanzee. 30
Dawkins argues that an estimate like 98 per cent in common does not mean
anything unless we specify the size of the unit we are comparing. It takes more than one set of opaque
lenses, of pre-conceived ideas, to prevent us from seeing what is in front of our noses. Those, who are
committed to closing the gap between two kinds of species, have many instruments,31
because the two
movements are merely different sides of the same coin. What affects the welfare of the planet affects us
all.32
Environmental historians, on the other hand, have demonstrated their the ability to invite insights
from radically specialized fields, such as ecology, geography, human rights, drawing a fairly balanced
model, depicting a constructive approach to conservation and preservation of both nature and man. But
this paradigm suggests that it is not that we cannot feel empathy, but we just do not want to.
Empathy and Transcendental Ethics: Inter-subjectivity between Man and Nature
Empathy may and may not precede sympathy. Inter-subjectivity is consciousness in the dyadic
model assuming that all human experience, including transcendental experience, has a valid information
basis, which is information, the pattern of energy, is the root of all perception. Inter-subjectivity has been
the constant theme in Indian treatment of trees, animals, and natural objects in general. The fifth-century
Sanskrit poet, Kalidasa, India’s greatest poet, writes,
“Making to tremble the flowering branches of the mango trees, spreading the cry of the cuckoo in
the regions the wind ranges ravishing the hearts of mortals, by the passing of the dew-falls gracious in the
springtide.” Kalidas’s mystical insights are just information, waiting to be interpreted. While we can
understand how human beings behave in relation to natural objects. For Rabindranath Tagore nature is
pure because it is free from commercialization and dehumanizing industrialization. It is both a respite and
an instructor. Tagore is not reactionary or opposed to the modernization of the world, but he is for
empathy between humans and nature. This has similarity with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s thought that the
spiritual world is primary compared to physical world, which is regarded as the secondary. As in
empathetic relations between man and pure nature, as depicted in Kalidas’s Meghaduta, or “Cloud
Messenger,” Tagore believes that the physical world through making humans aware of its beauty and
providing can be useful goods serving human beings. Such intimate wholeness is reflected in Hindu and
Buddhist religious paintings, called “mandala,”33
in which holistic understanding, of Kalidas and Tagore,
demonstrates an empathy between humans and nature of all kinds needs to include the inner realms of
experience, such as poet Tagore introduces ambitious experiments and criticisms of modern life, as he
founds an arts school (Santiniketan), a humanistic university (Visva-bharati), and a rural development
institute (Srinikeran). In Tagore’s Meghaduta corpus, five poems written composed over fifty years, the
category that signifies the Greek “apora” is called viraha, the longlining produced by a separation
between lovers, a longing that may or may not end in the sundered (cleaved) lover’s reuniting. This
30
Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and The Misrepresentation of Humanity (Durham, NC: Acumen, 2011), p. 152. 31
Tallis, Aping Mankind, p. 162. 32
Micheline R. Ishy, The History of Human Rights, pp.37, 67, 267. 33
Edward R. Canda, “East/West Philosophical Synthesis in Transpersonal Theory,” The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare, vol. 18, issue 4, article 10 (1991), pp. 137-150.
8
longing, taken from Kalidas, becomes the mode in which Tagore relates to preservation of nature. Certain
forms treat all knowledge as empirical while some regard disciplines such as mathematics and logic as
exceptions. The empirical principle to integrate conservation with human development involves new
forms of human intervention and restriction on land and water use. Kalidas’s philosophical conversation
seems bound to shape our moral and public policy, which resembles Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass,
1855. This is invocation of aesthetic experiences, i.e. tensing our muscle while we look at a flying
buttress.
For Ramachandra Guha, both Western “deep ecology” and development projects in the Third
World countries have merely minimized the damage. In India, the same notion as in deep ecology
pervades in the Vedantic conception of a single self, or atman, similar to Schopenhauer’s ethics of
universal compassion. All these experiences comprising empathy and sympathy for other species such as
trees, forests, animals, rivers, etc., are good for people. Contemporary researchers differentiate two types
of empathy: affirmative empathy referring to the sensations and feelings we get in response to others’
emotions, whereas cognitive empathy is called perspective taking. Both of them are mindfully aware of
our predicaments in analyzing environmental justice or injustice.
For the model for inter-subjective empathic hermeneutics is a text in which words and sentences
give meaning to the entire theme in empathy between man and nature. It is an understanding of the
unwritten expressions of our psychic life, being the symbolic action of many kinds. In saying so, Sen
argues that each approach to nature-loving has something to offer, but only rational capability address all
relevant concerns. Yet, it is equally true that our ability to transcendence equality between man and nature
and an ideal cognitive subject reveals a deep tension in democratic theory that we consider as sides of a
capacity contract that pulls democratic aspect to both embrace and expel vulnerability. One side of the
capacity contract bases arguments resides on a threshold level of our capacity.
However, empathy in foundational calculation is a limited resource, like a fossil fuel, which
cannot extend indefinitely. What, then, is the relationship between empathy and morality? Critics depict
empathy as a source of moral failure. Psychologists, such as Paul Bloom says that empathy is a parochial
narrow-minded emotion, one that will have to yield to reason if transcendental values are to survive.34
Sen
and others argue that empathy does not rely on an outdated view of emotion as a capricious beast that
needs to yield to somber reason. Research needs to be directed toward identifying the lines of fracture in
value estimates. The method of enquiry by philosopher Yayarama (Principles) argues that centrality
given to “doubt” in action and self simply carries the burden with a Cartesian one. Raghunath’s “new
reason” as well as early modern thinkers reject a variety of reductionist hypothesis, and argue for an
“across-the-board realism,” which embeds even a scientific realism with a common-sense-realism to the
“middle-sized” objects of every day experience.35
The relevance of other rules cannot be eliminated. Without the existence of the other to serve as a
foil for our own refection, awareness of the self-identity is not feasible. Inter-subjectivity means empathy,
understanding what others are feeling because we have experienced it ourselves in other’s shoes, whereas
sympathy essentially implies a feeling of recognition of others’ poor conditions. Sen’s ethical form of
empathy toward conservation, and indeed sustainable development, has been in the form of circularity
that is arguably not of a vicious but rather of a productive type; it occurs because the expressions of
human life in question are composites that take their meaning from the whole of which they are part and
34
Daryl Cameron and Michael Inzlicht, “Empathy is Actually a Choice,” The New York Times (Sunday, July 12, 2015), p.12. 35
Jonardon Ganeri, The Lost Age of Reason: Philosophy the Early Modern India, 1450-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp.6-7, 125-127.
9
in turn lend meaning to that whole. Lastly, and more significantly, Amartya Sen concludes that for the
successful integration of conservation and economic development, the negative image of the
philosophical pattern and the realist image of development need to be projected in the “new” conservation
approach that looks for social justice. This human destiny in transcendental shape is linked to the theory
of inter-subjectivity, a theme in ecosophy. The debate here is that one plausible way that the
extentionalist can exclude considering ethics as a persistent moral term in philosophy. However, some
environmental ethics may look like they are doing ontology and not ethics.
However, language so viewed does not pretend to be giving the one way true story any more than
language does in Rorty’s view. Ethical language in the end is instrumental rationality giving expression to
the world in a particular view, and often it is distorted expression.
Ecosophy and Conservation: Variations in Empathy
An equal powerful notion prevails in the environmental philosophy and ethical cognition by
means of European ecosophy. As elements in finely balanced eco-systems, the fragile well-being of
people depends on the integrity of those systems, which are our present practices – burning fossil fuels
dumping of nuclear waste, etc. that are threatening. That same perception would serve to spoil the
traditional picture of ourselves as set over against the rest of nature. In a more exotic metaphysical
interpretation, the Norwegian born, Arne Naess, born in 1912, ask for “deep ecology” that speaks of
“integrity” of nature and our belonging to it. He coins the term, “ecosophy” perhaps drawing on the word
of Spinoza’s doctrine of “God or Nature.” Inspired by Spinoza’s metaphysics, a key feature in Naess’s
“deep ecology” has been the rejection of atomistic individualism. The “deep ecology” policy offers a
shared passion for nature, forests and mountains, all for the benefit of nature and people. Sigmund Kvaloy
and Nils Faarlund (1973, 1989), Witoszek and Brennan (1999) and Naess (1973), endorse “biospheric
egalitarianism” declaring that all living things are alike in having value in their own right, independent of
their usefulness to others. The deep ecologist respects this intrinsic value, taking care, for example, when
walking on the mountainside not to cause un-necessary damage to the plants, or Indian faith in barefoot
walk on “mother earth.”
European ecosophy is viewed in India with a new transcendental twist. Vandana Shiva, who is
much appreciated for her spiritual inclination echoes this sentiment by arguing that “commodities have
grown, but nature has shrunk,” and thus, she calls for halting the commodification of the natural world,
which has particular severe consequences for the human rights of women, “the poorest among the poor,
… because with nature, they are the primary sustainers of society.” Having entered mainstream policy
debate, the human rights have taken a good place in international conferences throughout the world.
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), the German-American philosopher, characterizes the statement refugees in
the world as human rights violation.36
The sociological model in conservation policy goes too far to
suggest that environmental justice is irrelevant to well-being of human beings. Our emotions are not
always well suited to the decision we take in modern conservation. It is important to know how our
emotions lead us astray so that we can design incentives to help compensate for “our irrational biases.”37
Social assessment methods in environmental issues have been made by the World Bank for beneficiary
evaluations, participatory poverty assessments, and social assessments.38
In that sense, plurality serves the
interests of varied environmental needs. The Greek and Indian traditions of ethical philosophy both
36
Raghunatha Siromani, Inquiry into the Time Nature of Things (ed.), V.P. Dvivedi (Varanasi: Maha Mandalya Publishers, 1915). 37
W.D. Casbeer, Natural Ethical Facts: Evolution, Connectionism, and Moral Cognition (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003); cited in Lehrer, The Psychology of Subprime Mortgage.” 38
In contrast, Hart asks, “Does it pay to be Green, see S. Hart and G. Ahuja, “Does it Pay to be Green,” Business Strategy and the Environment, vol. 5 1996), pp. 30-37.
10
emphasize the significance of transcendental emotion as performing ecosophy. For both, the ideal ethical
state is conceived as imperturbability or detachment.
In the Democritean lineage as much as in some Buddhist schools, the ethical implications of the
principle of impermanence is fundamental. Plato, for example, teaches in the Timaeus, a rationale for
ethics that is identical to the thought underlying the “Four Noble Truths” (of Buddhism). Protagoras
argues that humans had long ago lived not in a Golden Age but in a state like that of animals, from which,
through long application of technological wit, they had risen to the condition of urban civilization.
Interestingly, in agreement with the naturalistic thread of Greco-Roman thought, the Indian philosopher
Uddalaka in the Chnadogya Upanishad, teaches that living according to “Nature” brings human
satisfaction. The materialist Carvaka School similarly teaches that the soul is produced accidentally by
atomic arrangements and will disintegrate and be reprocessed though “Nature,” atom by atom, after the
death of the body.39
However, an argumentative tradition prevails in attaching morals to both ecosophy
and transcendental norms applicable to men and nature.
First, in many publications, Descartes’ and Bacon’s licenses for us to “command” and “master”
nature, are cited in the confirmation of the conspiracy between dualist metaphysics and environmental
domination. For many environmentalists, the antidote is a robust naturalism, which portrays human
beings as made of the same physical stuff and subject to the same causal processes as everything else in
nature, but adds to an ecological perspective. This appears to be developing empiricism in ethics that is
attacked by the Greek thinker, Parmenides, who regards “reason” alone as the test of a theory. In India,
likewise, the philosopher Shankar accuses the Buddhists of applying such emotional device in an
illegitimate way. Shankar emphasizes that the Veda itself adjust to the teachings of different levels of
understanding and qualification. He addresses different levels of interest and capabilities, and yet, the idea
was restrictive. Thus, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, we find it in the criticism of the orthodox
opponents of Ram Mohan Roy, a remote transcendentalist, direct against his egalitarian “market-place
theology.” Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Vivekananda, the great spokesman of Neo-Hindu
tolerance and “universalism,” denounces the traditional theory of “adhikarivada as the result of pure
selfishness.”40
For Sen, these different levels of understanding means an avoidance of self-conscious
anthropocentric approach in viewing the nature/man debate. He argues that a strong human commitment
to use resources drives a wedge between personal choice and protection of nature. This assessment
enables comparisons in relative changes between different activities. One information becomes
meaningful for analysis when combined with other information. For example, it is difficult to know how
important the impact is to participants. The participant’s goal is to identify all valued benefits/dis-benefits
by engaging with the chains of practical reasoning.
Second, in the West, the term “moral sense” was first used by the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-
1713), whose writings reflect the optimistic tone both of the school of thought he set up and of so much of
the philosophy of the 18th-century Enlightenment. Joseph Butler (1692-1752), the then Bishop of the
Church of England, developed Shaftesbury’s position in two ways: (a) strengthening the case for a
harmony between morality and enlightened self-interest; (b) recognizing the human consciousness as the
way for later formulations of a universal ethic of conduct that might not be at odds with the path indicated
by even the enlightened self-interested individual reasoning. Almost in the same vein but with a different
philosophy, Indian transcendentalist argues that moral imagination is acceptable only if the imaginative
understanding understands the possible ways of being and acting is moral as the central concern of an
agent. Here, agents are in a position to evaluate many possibilities in terms of good or evil. This
transcendental inclusive model, which represents other views, other competing philosophical views as
being ultimately one’s own, where the idea of a didactic adjustment the different levels qualification can
be used by different points of view. Third, we can train ourselves and regulate our character, but the
levelers we pull are multiplied and strengthened by our being part of a community of mind who will
39
M. Hiriyana, Outlines of Indian Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1932), pp. 56-59. 40
Wilhelm Halbfsss, Tradition and Reflection, pp. 54-57.
11
support us in different ways and means in efforts to behave pro-socially or pro-nature. It is not a matter
of being brain-washed but rather of evaluating and accepting a desirable and possible course of action,
and more importantly, subscribing to a principle, which is an ethical value. We reach a position expressed
by Einstein in a statement to the Spinoza Society in 1893, “human beings, in their thinking, feeling, and
acting are not free but are just as casually bound as the stars in their motion.”
Last, how to logically rescue ethics from generalized moral principles? By claiming that we as
humans are able to construct explicit precepts, we are morally superior to animals, and we can say that a
lion is no more moral or immoral that a tree, but morality is a human construct and so, is not amenable to
explanation in biological terms.i It is no use of arguing that our ethical principles are a mere
rationalization of biological instincts, because rationalization is just as inexplicable in biological terms as
are ethical principles. We need not only a community of minds but also a set of rules for proportional
treatment of man and nature. This process in thinking leads us to the question of foundational ethics.
Methodologically, the rejection of predication in any supposition was accepted by the Cynics, who argue
that there is no foundational belief. Certain qualities lead to virtue ethic, self-rule and freedom from
opinions, others do not. Beyond this, no distinction are to be made. For the Buddhists, there is only one
way, detachment.41
Foundational Ethics and Judgments
Foundationalists respond to the regress problem by claiming that “foundations” of basic beliefs
support other beliefs but do not themselves require justification from other beliefs. These beliefs may be
justified because they are self-evident and infallible, as they drive from reliable cognitive mechanisms.
Perception and memory are possible examples of foundational beliefs. Sen’s primary foundational
transcendental value in conservation is the place of “self” which must be a seeker after value; we judge
value by guiding our behavior by value considerations. Foundationalism in epistemology means that
knowledge must be regarded as a structure raised upon certain secure foundations. Stoics as well as
Descartes found foundationalism as associated with “clear and distinct reason.” Its opponent is
coherentism, which stands for inter-locking strength. Coherence means that arguments must be linear
conclusions that flow directly from state premises.42
Sen challenges the foundationalism idea in
conservation ethics because with the rise of transcendentalism, questions of knowledge seem to have been
marginalized by questions of justification. Apparently, “knowledge” is understood as propositional
knowledge. The rejection of metaphysics, understood in Heidegger’s sense as the attempt to offer grounds
or foundations for our basic practices, discourses and beliefs. Is Sen trying to legitimatize discourse in
Hegel’s dialectic of Spirit or the Enlightenment appeal to reason? Given that people have a set of
preferences about preservation of nature, what rational procedures may be planned to aggregate these
cherished preferences into a single logical social choice preference ordering?
Does Western virtue ethics prove a foundational ethical norm? Classical Western moral
philosophy has the task of legitimizing and grounding our moral beliefs and institutions with the help of
fundamental principles, God as the law-giver, the principle of universalizability and the utility principle.
In contrast, the concept of dharma, like the German Recht, covers a large variety of different phenomena.
Today, both in India and the West, moral theory has broken loose from the constraint of the Kantianism-
Utilitarianism framework. The Indian theory of moral rules, part of the theory of “virtue ethics,” part of
communitarianism, adds a layer of Kantian-like duty for the sake of duty, reaching a transcendent goal
41
See T.W Rhys Davis and Herma Oldenberg, Vinaya Texts, vol. 1 (Sacred Books of the East), pp. 84-85. 42
B.K. Matilal, Perception: An essay on Classical Indian Theories of Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
12
(moksha), leaving aside the domain of religion.43
The goal of moksha can therefore not be wrong if the
decision to commit and act is based on a right motive. Its teleological ethics differ on the nature of the
end that eventual actions ought to promote.44
The Greek happiness virtues hold that ethics consist in
some activity appropriate to man as a human being, and thus tend to emphasize the cultivation of virtue in
the agent as the end of all actin. This teleological virtue ethics, hope and love, can be distinguished from
the Christian ideal of man as a being created in the image of God.45
Johnstone’s Philosophy and Argument begins with the problem of disagreement in foundational
philosophical argument and does not explain his conception of rhetoric and philosophy in its complexity.
He elicits the inner form of thought as a philosophy to describe the problem that originates and drives his
position to see the woods instead of the trees. He argues that philosophers make claims about nature and
the nature of knowledge. These claims must be tested by argument. In argument, philosopher aims at
validity, and the principles of validity are determined in logic. Philosophy is a critical activity. In
Aristotle’s Rhetoric, rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic. Sen develops a critique of rational action
theory, denouncing a too poor sense of intentionality and sociality. Instead he argues that the basic aspect
of consciousness, our target, is indeed perceiver which intentionality, or volition. We experience both
perception and intentionality at our level of organization. Thus Sen promotes a more complex
understanding that integrates values and ethics and raises the question of the motives of action. He does
not completely renounce the rational choice option, rather, seeks to complete it by introducing aspects of
compassion, commitment and multiple preferences as significant elements of choice and action.
If we connect the two themes, nature’s need and man’s sustained demand, then we look for
foundationalism that requires confidence in the rational individual’s capacity to get down to the
foundations. Richard Rorty (Philosophy and Mirror, 1779), presents knowledge as “anti-foundational”
because in the light of “foundationalist” discourse, we can lay claim to having access to the way things
are. Descartes (Meditations) shows that an isolated person secures foundations for the whole edifice of
human knowledge. For Peirce, this inquiry or the search for truth, is a public matter because it ends when
agreement is openly reached. However, Peirce’s argument is not a reason for giving up epistemological
inquiry of the Cartesian type. Descartes’s method of doubt is one way of formulating the task of
epistemology, and in this sense, all formulations of methods are useful.46
Transcendental argument is that
we can understand how something could be found as belief by thinking of it as “knowledge.” Here
propositional evidence is knowledge because knowledge entails belief. This is similar to the
Foundationalism in the Samkhya and Mimamsa Schools that look for the transcendental yearning of
foundational intelligence; the Rig-Veda (chapter 2) epistemology shows less concern with the schemes of
God or gods, and in the Yoga system, Isvara is simply an especially exemplary purusa that is part of
prakiti of human soul. In this mode, Ram Mohan Roy (1772-1833), the founder of Brahmo Samaj (Divine
Society), shapes himself as a cosmopolitan admirer of the European Enlightenment and of Christian
ethics, exhibits an insufficient fidelity to Indian the tradition.
In this discussion, thus, the question of ethics raises another issue: Does an environmental ethic
form part of a foundational relationships between man and nature? What is the contention of ethics that
are continually progressing? Can we claim in accordance with Derek Parfits (Reasons and Persons,
1984) that the consequentialist reasoning in ethics seem to be partial, because as Bruce Ackerman’s
(Ecological Economics) argues, “fairness” implies recognizing global and country level equity
dimensions, particularly in assuring a just transition to an economy that is low- carbon, resource efficient,
43
J.N. Mahanty, Classical Indian Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), p 122. 44
In India, the concept of dharma and moral stand for furnishes the common, semantic ground for the meaningful philosophical disagreement on the subject of ethics. See Shyam Ranganathan, Ethics and the History of Indian Philosophy (Delhi: Matilal Publishers, 2007). 45
“Philosophical Quality of Life and Ethical Dimensions: Philosophical Theories of Quality” in http://medincine.jrank.org/psges/1438/Quality-Life-Philosophical Dimensions,” (accessed on 10/5/2010). 46
Charles Landesman, An Introduction to Epistemology (Oxford, Blackwell, 1997), p. 81
13
and socially inclusive. He is one of the early American thinkers to argue that the industrial revolution has
replaced human workers with machines and has increasingly erased the importance of individuality due to
the uniform machines and production. When these contentions are de-constructed, we are usually faced
with the ill-defined world and words, emergent from it. Heidegger opts for a new relation to language
altogether, one that results from a “meditative openness” to the world. The world speaks through us when
we disregard the metaphysical voice.47
The question is whether the experimental dimension can be
explored adequately by means of Husserl’s “reflective methodology,” which means both descriptive and
reflective modes.48
Husserl’s interpretation of “empathy” is questioned by some who argue that Husserl
empathetic-communicative process may not objective.49
As Heidegger points out, life-experience is
imbued with meaning and is intentionally structured and has an inner articulation and rationality; it is self-
understanding. He rejects the idea that experimental life should be mute, instead, life-experience is
imbued with meaning.50
In other words, transcendental words, phenomenology must build on familiarity
that life has with itself. It has two aspects – intentionality and inter-subjectivity. The intuitive idea is that
the qualifying feature is a concept, empirically acquired by the perceiver and used to categorize the object
perceived. It is beyond Kant’s critical method, because the picture of inference first, explanation second,
seriously underestimate the role of explanatory considerations of reasoning.
For Sen, this discussion is mostly about evidence of probability. If we assume that prior
probabilities (in foundational ethics) should align themselves with expected probabilities posterior to the
future acquisition of knowledge (good conservation principle), we assign the probability of being known
in the future of a privileged status in the present moment. Why should we give the property of being
known by us tomorrow a privileged status? We give preference because it is truth-telling property. No
doubt, we cannot take advantage of new transcendence knowledge in advance, but we must cross that
bridge when we come to it, and accept the consequences of our epistemic judgment. If the concept
“knows” is vague, likewise the concept “justified” is also vague. As Harman (1965) and Lipton (1991)
argue in reference to the best explanation, we often choose between hypotheses by asking which of them
explains our evidence.51
Interestingly, Sen never completely ignores the rational framework in the basic question of ethics,
as he does not commit himself to “a weak sense of rationality.”52
In terms of human intervention in
sustainability of nature, Sen expresses his moral philosophy that draws not from Adam Smith’s moral
philosophy, but from Kant’s, which suggests respect for the identifiable dignity of natural objects,
animals and trees, and derivatively, respect for moral values.
Justification of Foundational Ethics: Principles in Conservation
Transcendentalists argue that the cosmos is itself a commonwealth and to run from it is to be an
alien in the universe, an exile. This needs justification. E = K suggest a very modest type of
foundationalism on which all one’s knowledge serves as the foundation for all one’s justified beliefs.
47
M. Heidegger develops the idea that phenomenology is the name of a philosophical approach specifically interested in consciousness; it is more than psychological self-observation. See Dan Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), pp. 5-6. 48
E. Husserl, Shorter Works, edited by P. McCormick and F.A. Allison (Notre Dame, IA: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). 49
Kevin Hermberg, “Empathy and Knowledge: Husserl’s Introductions to Phenomenology” (January 1, 2003), http://epublications.marqutntte.edu.dissertations 50
Cited in Dan Zahavi, Subjectivity, pp. 5-7; 76-85.Interestingly, unlike Peirce, Russell argues that one structure is accurate representation of another if there is one-one correlation between the terms, as well between the relations of the two structures. See Bertrand Russell, “Vagueness,” Australian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 1 (1923); C. S. Peirce, “Vague,” Dictionary of Philosophy, edited by J.M. Baldwin, London, 1902). 51
T. Williamson, Knowledge and its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), and its Limits, pp.186, 194. 52
Sen, On Ethics and Economics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), p. 104.
14
Perhaps, we can understand how something could found belief only thinking of it as “knowledge.” Sen’s
paradigm of justice is centered round concrete concepts of freedom seems to be emerging, because
relations between paradigms are not clear.53
Quine’s assertion that epistemology, being the most viable
branch of philosophy, which deals with nature and humans, runs into self-contradiction.54
In Husserl’s
analysis, perception is presentational; imagination is re-presentational. In this sense, the object is said to
be mentally represented, rather than perceptually presented. In Husserl’s formulation the present memory
does not really contain the past experience, but instead contains it only intentionally and in this sense
“intentionality implicates it.”55
Yet, like animals, human beings are surrounded by living and non-living
material objects, but unlike other animals their world is world of concrete facts and facts are not lumps of
matter. Mind, as the evolutionary theorist, J.B. Haldane maintains, is not a mere by-product of matter.
The subordination of ethics to neuro-science (experimental philosophy”) is self-loathing in philosophy. It
is erroneous to conclude that philosophy should investigates ethical issues by scanning the brains of
people. Quine fails to see un-natural nature of knowledge. As the Princeton philosopher Gilbert Harman
stipulates, moral philosophy will never grow unless it matures into social psychology. It is time for
philosophy to reassume its basic duty: to look critically at the conceptual framework within which
transcendence ethical thoughts operates.
Critically arguing implies, as revealed by the Samkhya and Mimamsa Schools, the transcendental
but intellectual yearning that contends that the issue of universalizing consideration of environmental
ethics belongs to epistemology. As the attention space was divided between Buddhist and Hindu schools,
the former staked its stance ever more sharply on the destruction of any realist position, including weak
ones encompassing both universals and particulars. Accounts of these “human capabilities” (Sen’s words)
for argumentation differ among philosophers and environmental justice scholars as they work under
different concepts dealing the environmental ethics, but for Sen, they have become human capacities for
an appropriation of morals that call for the need for an appropriate social and philosophical environment
that may provide a common platform for preservation of man and nature.
In Greece, issues of ethics coming to the fore only after the intellectual community acquired an
internal density and hence a push to higher levels of abstract self-reflection. From the central conception
of typos (smoke vs. mist), the Cynics developed an ethic which is like that of Buddhist schools based on
the Madhyamika, arguing that one way of deciding on an ethical action is to find out whether it leads to
viraga, detachment or attachment.56
In their eschatological aspect, Indian theorists consider the effects
supposedly especially of spiritual actions, some of these effects flowing into the after-life via karma duty
ethics. The philosophers of the Nyaya School hold that the knowledge that brings about the desire, and
then the will to do, is knowledge by the “agent-to-be” that the desired goal is achievable and that
performance of the action will bring about some good to the agent, this good being acquiring sukha or
happiness, and getting rid of duhka or pain. No attempt should be made to ground the theory in
metaphysics. The only legitimation that is offered is epistemological, which argues that there is a moral
imperative for an agent to inform himself as much as possible about a situation before judging the
appropriate curse of actin. Of course, this imperative is derived from consequential thinking, because a
better-informed agent is able to bring about better consequences.
For Sen, conservation ethics must be for practical needs. Practical necessity is one element that
goes into the idea of moral obligation. What Kant’s categorical imperative does not mean that “I must,”
but is construed as unconditional practical necessity as being peculiar to morality. It means whatever we
must want must be a kind of necessity, and it is only moral reasons that could transcend desire in that
way. His picture of imperative necessity is free from causality, as a demand of moral inner law, which
53
Timothy Williamson, Knowledge and Its Limits, pp. 221-228. 54
W.V.O., Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized,” in his Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969). 55
Mark Siderits et al (eds.) Self, No Self? (Oxford University Press2011), chapter five. 56
Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies (New York: Allworth Press, 2002), pp. 439, 534, 595.
15
according to Ricour, does not exhaust the question concerning the identity of the self. Hindu noumenal
Hindu scripts depict the sense of reflective reality, which says that nature speaks through us when we let
go of the metaphysical voice. It reminds us of the spirit of Alasdair McIntyre’s insistence on the central
importance of narrative to ethical thought, which is a rejection of modernist ethical thought.57
However, if
a “holistic ethic is really to incorporate the whole story, it “must systematically embed itself in historical
eventfulness,” otherwise, it may not be objective.
Within the context of societies dominated by possessive individualism, these concerned
practical dilemmas can be resolved with some success by reconciling the interests of humans with those
of environment.58 An influential “theory and method” for the analytical philosophy has been developed
by Quentine Skinner’s core idea that argues that we understand a philosophy to the extent that we can
fill in the context in which the philosophy is written with adequate derail, using an “illocutionary
intervention” by the contextual texts. The inadequacy in Skinner “context” is explained by the Indian
“new reason” philosophy of Raghunatha and others, which argues that context should include various
contexts – social, political, intellectual, and inter-textual. In the past, in Europe, the power of intellectual
intervention used to stay with the Aristotelians in the university departments, whereas in India, it was
located with religious and secular public figures. Indian thinkers have been able to draw upon the deep
intellectual resources when confronted with the profoundest rupture of all, the British colonization.
Some of these same resources were to enable it not only to survive but also to emerge in people like
Gandhi, Tagore, Matilal,59 and now Amartya Sen.
Environmental ethic requires public justification under indeterminacy. The Kantian procedure (in
law-making) faces a dilemma. If we follow Kant totally excluding which sets us apart as mere in private
ends irrelevant to moral legislation, we may get a shared result, but only because we have ignored basic
evaluative diversity. John Rawls avoids the indeterminacy by introducing powerful philosophical devices
– maximum reasoning. Sen’s “Buridan ass” – the donkey who was precisely midway between two
haystacks and could not decide whether to turn right, X, to eat from one or left, and ended up dying of
starvation (Z). The less interesting but more common, interpretation is that the ass was indifferent
between two haystacks, and could not find any reason to choose one haystack over the other, Sen
argues. Given this, standard utility theory cannot show that there is a rational choice to be made from
the set. In short, deep moral disagreement is the inevitable result of deep evaluative pluralism in any
deliberative model.60
Inferences and Ethical Judgments
Inference is a process of moving from provisional acceptance of a proposition to acceptance of
some proposition, to acceptance of others. Sen proposes a theory that recognizes the importance of certain
inferences, but these inferences are not absolute. While consequentialism focuses on promoting some
kind of good consequences, teleological ethics (telos end and logos is science Greek rationality) advocate
a plurality of ends, including the attainment of virtue ethic. Sen’s objective is to analytically evaluate the
conceptualization and is possible, implementation of philosophically integrated conservation and
development of practical program. His focus is on the philosophical interventions into such matters as
57
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IA: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 216. 58
Julie Davidson, “Sustainable Development,” Environmental Ethics, vol. 22, pp. 26-27. 59
J. Ganeri, The Lost Age of Reason, p. 15. 60
Isaac Levi, “Hard Choices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 84; Sen, Collective Choice and Social Welfare, p. 3; Sen, “Maximization and the Act of Choice,” p. 184; Gerald Gaus, The Order of Public Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp.306-310.
16
tree-hugging or oil-rig management. His conceptualization may lead to programs attempting to integrate
conservation with economic well-being. For Sen, this is “development as freedom.” But he hastens to
insist that institutional ethics for facilitating collective capabilities are as important as to the expansion of
free will as sustaining the philosophical foundation for those interested in pursuing emotional
environmental sustainability. Going back to Emperor Asoka and diplomat-cum-economist Kautilya, Sen
argues that Indian philosophical attitude to nature has taken care of emotional and spiritual norms that
have been based on logic and rationality. It is a debate about deontology versus consequentialism in
interpretation. In essence, Sen expands the scope human capabilities to evaluate the environmental issues.
The pluralist ethicists include some, if not all, personal goods as fundamental ethical values, alongside
wellbeing and welfare, the immediate concern for the entire human race as well as tress, animals, and
water.
Because human actions may be unreasonable, we need to get into the moral issues that
demonstrate the means to moral rules. The natural law, as elaborated by Locke, argues that in the original
community governed by “natural law” which stipulated that the land could be appropriated provided
others would have the opportunity to get their future shares, on the assumption that property right did not
accrue merely by virtue of labor. Locke makes it clear that a community had a partial right and equally
nature must not be exploited to the “fullest human interests.” Locke does not present his case in
philosophical terms, and it does not require us to follow end-state principles, such as equality and need.
Rather, it requires that land not to be concentrated in the hands of few owners so that this concentration
itself limits procedural or environmental justice (voluntariness of actions). For clarity, Nozik argues that
the argument does not rely on any end-state principle. His argument is that the focus is on a particular
way that appropriate actions affect others, and not on the structure of the situation that results.61
The aim
of Locke and Nozik is not to convey truth about Locke’s world of nature, but to free us from German
National Socialism’s pathological fixation and to provide a curative therapy for the diseases in languages,
used by contending groups. For Sen, environmental ethics with its moral philosophy involves
systematizing, defending, and recommending both concepts and norms of right and wrong behavior
toward equitable protection of nature and humans. Sen’s emphasis is on duty ethics (Greek word, deon,
duty) that had many duties, as spelled out by the 17th-centry German philosopher Samuel Oufedorf.
Kant’s “categorical imperative” is different from hypothetical imperatives, hinging on some personal
desire. In contrast, Sen relies on consequentialism that tells us we evaluate our good and bad
consequences of our action toward the environment, and he accepts alternative notion of rights, such as
positive rights, collective rights, or animal rights, and this alternative position demands a definition of
harm. In short, Sen’s foundational theory of knowing moral truths differ from coherence theory of truth,
which relies on coherence but provides no clues if a foundational stance can be taken in terms of truth.
Interestingly, the analysis of a cognition is not an analysis of the object in the ontological mode,
but rather of the content in an epistemological vein. First, mechanistic concept and analysis fail to answer
the question what guides the mechanism. It is not possible to explain the emergence of higher stages from
lower one – of animal life from mere matter, or mind from merely animal. Mind and spirit must, argues
Aurbindo, are things which universal structure has hidden in herself” before their manifest emergence.
Second, it would be erroneous t think that evolution ends with emergence of human-consciousness. In
that sense, Skinner’s context misses the point that “logical knowledge” can at best give the structure of
being and not being itself. In short, just as Kant’s transcendental idealism is a philosophical interpretation
of ordinary experience, and a not a criticism of it, so the Advaita doctrine of Brahman is no rejection of
but an interpretation of concrete faith.
61
Robert Nozik, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
17
In short, as John Searle argues, there is no obstruction to our studying subjective, first-person
facts, with “objectivity.” If we do not already accept well-being as a value, then there seems to be
argument for why we should promote well-being. Poetic imagination calls for cognitive judgment. Indian
inter-subjectivity as presented by poets/philosophers represents the relationship between self and the
other, ego and alter ego, individual and community. Edmund Husserl makes the constitution of inter-
subjectivity its goal in the Cartesian Meditations (1929). He means to say that “we” is a component of the
“I.” 62
Sen’s Proportionality in Ethics
Time, space, and the causal series are the work of the intuitive stage of knowledge as opposed to
the work of the intuitive stage of knowledge as opposed to the conceptual one. But it is the pure relation-
less intuition of reality, which may be termed intellectual intuition but the intuition that imposes its forms
on the real substrate or in other words empirical intuition.63
Proportionality is the propositional calculus. Sen argues that environmental ethics may well be
assessed by both cognitive reasoning and affective imagination, both arguing why agents realize a
particular one among many possibilities. The Greek verb in a sentence cognates with Latin video,
meaning “know by seeing;” in other words, “even if someone should succeed in telling the truth, if he is
not speaking from direct personal experience but from conjecture, then his statement is invalid
methodologically, regardless of its correspondence or lack of correspondence with the facts.”64
Kalidas’s
emotional attachment to Nature’s purity, is an ecological perception which is “perceiving the environment
we,” in the words of Gibson, “co-perceive ourselves.” As Gibson insists, it has two principal aspects: (a)
the optic flow provides information about the movement and spacial position of the perceiver; and (b)
“we perceive objects as affording actions.” In perceiving affordance, we perceive ecological objects
relative to our own dimensions, abilities and perhaps inclinations.
Nevertheless, a reflective perceiving deserves a match between intention and movement, as a
transcendentalist Tagore would claim, and requires a prior indexical awareness that can simultaneously
play a practical role as well as an epistemological role, but as Brooks argues, we over-value our cognitive
analytical rationality and “autonomous will” (Sen’s view) as the motors of success, and unduly under-
value “emotion” and intuition, thereby giving rise to infamous “confirmation bias.”65
Thus, Adam Smith
(The Theory of Moral Sentiment, 1759), confirms that our idea of the notion of “perception” is a kind of
movie motion playing inside our heads in the so-called Cartesian theater. Bernard Williams examines the
Humean theory of motivational action, which makes it clear that there are two elements in Hume’s theory
of understanding. First, every action should be justified through reference to some desires, which for Sen
becomes “preferences,” suggesting that belief alone is not enough. Second, the argument that purports
this conclusion is called “the teleological argument.”66
Sen claims that the teleological argument is
derived from Aristotle, who argues that the good for man cannot be whimsically stopped in the name of
efficient reasoning only. However, the Aristotelian line of thought emphasize information from the five
62
Cited in Louis Agosta, Empathy and Inter-subjectivity,” in Joseph Lichtenberg et all (eds.), Empathy 1 (London: The Analytic Press, 1984), pp. 44-45. 63
Sir Brajendranath Seal, The Positive Sciences of the Ancient Hindus (Memphis, TN: General Books LLC, 2012), pp.4-7. 64
Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought, pp. 328-329. 65
David Brooks, The Social Animal (New York: Random House, 2011), p. 424. 66
Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
18
physical senses and the external experience. Lao Tse, Gautama Buddha, Zoroaster, Plato and the Gnostic
Greeks emphasize internal experience.67
Thus, the general welfare economics does homogenize the universe of heterogeneous goods and
does not differentiate the universe of the homogenous human species.ii In his essay, “Rational Fool”
(1977), Sen argues that the purely economic man is close to being a social motion, and that a person, who
has no use for distinctions between his positive and normative choices and interest and welfare must be a
bit of a fool. The preference ordering of orthodox economics is a serious abstraction from the real world
as well as from distinctions of basic significance. Thus, Sen observes that when advantage is equated with
utility, efficiency coincides with Pareto optimality, but insofar the notion of advantage is changed, so the
content of efficiency and equality. Sen disagrees on what constitutes “the good for man.” A superior
maxim, involving a reasoned investigation into a generic teleology for a specie versus sui generis
individualist conception of the main issue is the human reason that is capable of deliberate judgment
about “generic” human needs, and not Sen’s endorsement of culturally dependent values favored by
individual critical evaluation. Timothy Williamson (Knowledge and its Limits) argues that the concept of
knowledge cannot be analyzed into a set other concepts; instead, it is sui generis. Thus, though
knowledge requires justification, truth, the word “knowledge” cannot be, Williamson argues, accurately
regarded as simply shorthand for justified true belief. However, given a choice between Hume’s account
of the “passions” and Sen’s kind of intellectualism, it is certain that people would be inclined to accept
the passions, affective and touching, as the best candidate for unmoved mover.
These proportionality rules have two components: first, ethical rules should have broader
“affective values” beyond cognitive revelations, and second, they serve the interests of the widest possible
human and nature’s needs, and not merely equalization of justice among humans. The exploratory
function of ethical imagination is forward looking because it concerns the question of which our available
possibilities we should attempt to realize now and in the future. The Stoic describe affective passion in the
form of naturalistic philosophy. Their account of the process which leads from sensation to action, is like
Epicurus’s, based mainly on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, but like Epicurus’s version, with avenues
opened up toward revision of the hexis, our disposition. This disposition amounts to Buddhist “sensation,”
coming from rom contact of an object with a sense organ. For the Stoics, then, actions rise from a
psychological process which may be automatic, the arising of impulsive actions, which in fact contains a
more or less concealed element of Sen’s “free will,” a kind of hexis.68
Again, some of the affective
virtues, forming disposition, can be formulated, in Indian tradition, as rules of action. Thus, to a charity
corresponds to the rule “un-conditionality” as given to the needy.” Some virtues are not actional, but are
modes of the inner being, transcendence. These are both compassion and detachment. Sattva-
valambanakaruna or compassion that depends upon the truth of taps suffering of all species. Compassion
is inseparable from emptiness (sunyatta), as sunyata compassion is also “transcendent” (lokottara),
beyond the worldly values. What is usually called the ethical is only a part that is mingled with cognitive
and affective stages of human “capabilities.”69
Sen conforms to Parson’s reasoning that advocates the institutionalization of a norm, which is
rule-following consideration more generally, which may be accommodated simply by positing an
intentional state associated directly with actions. Norm, Sen insists, cannot be simply be subsumed into
the agent’s outcome-based utility function, but that they represent sui generis constraints on the actions
chosen. He develops a system or representation for a general utility function based on norms. However,
67
“A Dyadic Model of Consciousness,” Institute of Noetic Sciences, CA (Sept 19, 1995). 68
Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought, pp. 622-623. 69
J.N. Mahanty, Classical Indian Philosophy, p. 114.
19
people follow the rules because they want to follow the rules, without attaching too much values. In order
to produce a truly general theory of action, one has to introduce norms into the utility function in a way
that is completely vacuous with respect to the content of these norms, a kind of Sen’s “preference.”
Herbert Gintis calls this as belief, preference as well as constraint.70
To overcome constraints one needs to
use affective action. In this sense, moral philosophy has been dominated by attempts to impose
axiomatization on morality, delivering a maximally parsimonious set of moral rules from which all other
more concrete obligations could be derived. This kind of syllogism in the form of logic from the time of
Aristotle to Mill has been used as inductive. The widespread presence of the Hellenistic schools
throughout the eastern Roman Empire makes this inductive variant more likely to have turned up in India
than Aristotle’s. There were Epicurean teachers active in Afghanistan and north-western India. Epicurean
logicians stripped Aristotelian logic of its universals and re-shaped it into an empiricist form. Like the
Indian Naiyayika logic, the Epicurean form is based on particular-to-particular reasoning employing both
induction and analogy. It does not accept the legitimacy of the universal proposition and is not involved
in a quasi-metaphysical belief in abstract logical necessity.71
Feasibility of Generalized Moral Rules
Thinkers emphasize the need to balance interests of various receivers. Conservation effort has to
be more sensitive to the dangers of extrapolations about agricultural system on the basis of very precise
but isolated evidence, and thus, it is no longer necessary for environmental ethicists to castigate the
abstract theme as too much grand theory and not enough social context. Sen’s argument is that Utilitarian
theorists must answer the charge that ends do not justify the means. Commenting on harm to species and
human beings, Henry Shue also argues that corporations and business houses are morally bound to create
transfer of harmful technologies because, among others, developing countries alone cannot be expected to
impose strict technological and environmental standards because countries have to compete with other
countries for foreign investments. A second idea is that no institution has the moral rights to inflict harm
in the name of well-being. Although Shue’s second argument is acceptable, no one should cause harm to
nature or human beings so as to hold down the production costs, a critical question is how to define
“infliction of harm.” At what stage inflicting a higher “probability” of damages, immediate or remote,
constitute harm. One of the chief argument of Henry Shue is that a governmental regulation is not a must
because if forced on corporations, they can themselves can regulate harm.72
Certainly, corporation
themselves cannot police themselves as Sen’s example of Alaska’s oil spill suggests. On the other hand,
the general public derive “responsibility through ability,” but do the citizens have the realistic ability to
make an effective position? As has been exemplified by the India’s worst industrial disaster in Bhopal in
central India in 1984, citizens have only an implied social contract, and no effective strength.
Generalized moral Justice can be evaluated from three ethical dimensions. First, hedonic theories
mean an act of self-interpretation in which happiness or pleasure are unmediated sensation. Second,
rational preference theories define desires in terms of actual satisfaction. They mean that a good life
affirms an objective state of the world which conforms to what people rationally desire. Third, theories
of human flourishing imply a capacity that provide people with various types of resources, material as
well as spiritual. This capacity, as Sen stipulates, means a plan of self-fulfillment. Sen argues that human
beings are not necessarily seated at the top of the ethical hierarchy because the ethical calculation requires
70
Joseph Heath, Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 72-73. 71
Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Philosophy, pp. 511-513 72
Henry Shue, “Exporting Hazards,” in Boundaries (ed.).P Brown and Henry Shue (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1981), pp. 107-108.
20
a value system that calls for a human efforts for sustainability of nature in a proportional balancing vein.iii
He makes a strong statement by reaffirming that we, the humans, are responsible for disturbing the
nature’s “state of nature” by acting against “forest,” the “depth of ground of the ground water table,” and
causing the decline of “living creatures.” He concludes that we add to “impurities and pollutants” by our
deliberate misdeeds causing to harm not only to the “state of nature” but also ourselves. “We must not,
therefore think of the environment in terms of exclusively” conserving the “pre-existing natural
conditions,” it is misuse of our “capability.”73
Proportional allocational justice refers to the morally proper apportionment of benefits and
burdens, such as toxic waste dumps, dirty air, etc. among members of the public. John Rawls and other
theorists of ethical values argue that by distributive justice we, humans, can provide a standard by means
of which our society can assess the distributive aspects for preservation of the basic structure. Bruce
Ackerman interprets this as our proportionate initial entitlements of a scarce resource, which is
convertible into social good. Norton presents this deliberate attempt in terms of a policy converge
between eco-centric and anthropocentric perspectives for bi-diversity that may provide a good example of
value eclecticism, maintain a balance between nature and society.74
In all these instances, there is a
demand for equitable distribution of social justice as well as environmental justice.
There is nothing new in all these ideas because the analysts and moral theorists merely restate of
what has been said by generations of ethicists. Some, of course, would go further by pleasing for
proactive human action. For instance, The African Initiated Christian Church in Zimbabwe offers a
program to “cloth the earth” with new trees to cover human-induced nakedness. Its “new green program”
ushers an ecological program for action to integrate a conservation ethic with the heartbeat of church
praxis, the practical application of a theory with a devotional spirit. Religious beliefs becomes the
environmental ethics, and act as a tool for conservation as well as human rights.
Mind and Cosmos
In Greek kosmos (order) the whole world is conceived in terms of destiny and justice. Thomas
Nagel (Mind and Cosmos) is one of the pioneers who argue there is a world beyond the empirical and
material world. His chief argument is that in order to achieve a fairly comprehensive understanding of the
world we need to recognize the world beyond, i.e. - the transcendental world. It fits with the idea, as
Kapogiannis puts it, of an “adaptive cognitive function.” It means, in Kant’s words (Critique of Practical
Reason), knowledge can be subject to intuitive understanding of man, not to be understood by reason. It
is hard-wired into the brain because it is of evolutionary benefit. The communal and spiritual sense
conferred by transcendentalism, we are told, have given groups of hunter-gathers a more developed
feeling of togetherness. Hood argues that the evolutionary adaptation is the expression of the way our
minds are structured.75
This argues that economics ultimately evolved from “Nature,” in particular the
exchange of goods and services which are ultimately derived from Nature. On the other hand, the modern
economic theory has become detached from “Nature” and has largely caused the destruction of Nature.
Only with correct transcendental foundations we are able to appreciate how ultimately interconnected we,
humans, are intimately connected with Nature, and our survival depends on a balancing act. The high
level of consumption that is directly connected to the overuse of the resources of the planet and the
terrible waste problems that caused global warming, ozone depletion and our current destruction of
habitat. All of these mismanagement of nature generated huge physical problems that are bringing us to
the brink of evolutionary breakdown. In an urban setting, we live in a human-created environment,
73
Sen, The Idea of Justice, p. 269, Sen, “Rational Fools,” pp. 317-344. 74
See Joseph Heath, Following the Rules (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), ch. 8. 75
Tallis, Aping Man, pp. 323-324.
21
surrounded by other people plus a few domesticated plants and animals, as well as pests that have
overcome our defenses. We are biological beings, as dependent on the biosphere as any other life form
and we forget our animal nature at our peril. Modern definition of truth, such as those as pragmatism and
instrumentalism, which are practical rather than contemplative, are inspired by industrialization as
opposed to aristocracy.
Some sociologists go so far as to suggest that the environmental justice may not be linked to
human well-beings. A prominent environmentalist argue that nature may not be equal force in the matter
of equation. Obviously, such marginalization of nature has been a fashion through the industrial progress
of humanity. Politically, as Attfield argues, an environmental ethic has become an ideological tool for
solidarity. However, Sen has a different approach to conservation. In his essay about “environmental
evaluation” in the Japanese Economic Review (1995), and also in his conversation with Bina Agarwal,
Sen recommends that we, human beings concerned with conservation, should pay due attention to
Gautama Buddha’s Sutta Nipata, requiring that human beings, being more powerful than nature, must pay
adequate attention to preservation of the status quo, if not an enhancement of “the quality of human lives
in order to balance the “asymmetry of power.”76
In Sutta Nipata, there is hardly race of formal dialectical argumentation, but it attempts to turn
attention from inherited lore about reality to the direct evidence of experience as human agency. This
principle accords well with the Burndland Report (1987) that with a much broader development model
states that “human being as agents” for development should have some balanced freedom of action. The
Report argues that the total stock of assets, man-made roads and nature-given minerals and water, may
not remain constant, and as such, characterizes sustainable development as “development as :development
that meets the needs of the current generation,” and must not “compromise the ability of future
generations to meet their own needs.”
Critical to Sen’s debate about the balancing act is the idea of choice, or a moral option. Too much
choice as desire in justice, ague Sheena Ayengar of Columbia University and Mark Lepper, of Stanford
University, “is demotivating.” In Gita, the right is to only the action. Morally, its interest is not in the
causes of human conduct, but in its signification, its objective, its aim is not to form legal formulation, but
to concentrate on the reciprocal interaction between particular actions and their ethical contexts. It does
not say how we act that is descriptive but to evaluate a possible moral code that takes of environment and
human well-being. The dialogue between cognitive science and spiritual ideas is empirical. Edmund
Gettier (1963) challenges the traditional definition of knowledge as justified true belief, and now there is
widespread agreement among philosophers that traditional definition is incorrect or at least incomplete.
Yet, nobody seems to agree on what the correct definition of knowledge is. In conclusion, our existing
moral value concept lacks a definitional structure. As the philosopher Patricia Churchland puts it, “no one
has the slightest idea how to compare the mild headache of five million against the broken legs of two.”77
Trees or Human Jobs? Intentionality and Conflicting Interests
The psychologist Paul Slovic uncovers some rather startling limitations on our capacity for moral
reasoning when thinking about large groups of people, or, indeed, about groups larger than one. However,
76
Daisetz Suzuki, “The Basis of Buddhist Philosophy,” in D.T. Suzuki on Indian Mahayana Buddhism, ed. Edward Gonze (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), pp. 227-250. 77
P. M. Churchland, The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 19950, p. 72.
22
one of the great tasks of civilization is to create cultural mechanisms that protect us from the moment-to-
moment failures of our ethical intuitions. Here, science of morality could be indispensable to us.78
For Sen, the environmental ethic faces dilemmas not only between competing human interests,
but also between contrasting morals that deal with practical human interest and the sustainability of
Nature. For instance, a resource allocation idea has been applied to the “Kasar Region” in Northern
Nigeria where the lack of a tax on owners of firewood and the fuel wood production was supposed to
reduce pressure on the poor to exploit vegetation resources. The regional Muslim Sultan exempted the
poor village firewood tree-owners from any taxation apparently to preserve nature and help the poor to
have their rights in subsistence livelihood, although in reality the liberal taxation policy might have
helped the Sultan to maintain his tradition apolitical authority and social control. Sen’s environmental
entitlement notion has been incorporated by several international organizations,79
which have developed
a subsidiary concept in the rural “livelihood concept” with rural thinking in which villagers may resort to
risks as well as safety measures in the management of natural resources.80
Attfield advocates an
environmental ethics that need to be confined to what has already happened, but what could produce
reasoned accounts of goals that should be global as well as for humans and wild life in the future. This
futuristic vision is projected by Sen as he argues in a novel way that a moral environmental policy should
encourage female education and gainful employment that could eventually help reduce fertility rates.
Interesting, he adds, this policy could reduce the pressure on global warming and “the increasing
destruction of natural habitats.” Likewise, he insists that formal school education on Indian environmental
ethics in a spiritual mode could make students of more conscious for conservation. This is what Petit calls
goal-modifying commitment integrating commitment into the theory of rational choice. Norms on this
view can be understood as reasons to change one’s preferences.
In Sen’s thesis, then, there is an apparent conflict between human perception and Sen’s “agency.”
This dual commitment is intimately connected to the role of beliefs as reasons for beliefs and action.
When Sen argues that a well-educated informed school student has increased his power of perception, the
person, now educated, has indeed necessarily acted intentionally. Sen’s speculation on the differences
between pointing and grasping require further explorations of the relations between two behaviors. In
other words, are some human actions toward preservation of natural resources necessarily intentional?
Sen’s argues that gainful employment of women can reduce fertility rates, reducing the pressure on global
warming and increased destruction of animals and forests. His argument is that agency power does not
depend on a single, indivisible process. Instead they are distinct ways in which different forms of
intentions are implemented. As if, the implementation of different intentions take place through separable
neural systems.
In contrast, pitted against the modernist view of pragmatic intentionality, which Sen calls the
"fierce" or "hard knocks" approach, has been an equally uncompromising critique voiced by grassroots
activists and nongovernmental organizations around the world. Sen views this in the “Chipko movement”
in the Himalayan foothills, where peasants symbolically hugged trees to stop the logging that was
destroying their traditional forest-based economy. It has parallel in the Zapatista movement, in the
impoverished Chiapas region of Mexico, whose enigmatic leader, Subcomandante Marcos, railed against
78
Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (New York: Free Press2010), pp.71-71. 79
Sacred Ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Resource Management (Philadelphia, PA: Taylor and Francis, 1900, p. 158. 80
“Resource Management,” www.livelihood.org (accessed 10/34/2010).
23
globalization as a "hemorrhage that fattens the powerful."81
For Sen’s environmental statement is another
aspect of “Orientalism” without the usual romanticizing and self-enhancing tendency that has led to the
repeated binary of the “Spiritual East” versus “Rational West,” meaning one is superior to the other.
Romantic orientalists, like the German idealists, projects the East as a fantastic “other,” an unknown alien
inviting outsiders to the exotic East. As Romantics exorcized the East, they projected “the hope that the
ills of Western society can be assuaged by the supposedly more spiritual, primal wisdom of Asia.”82
It takes more than one set of opaque lenses, of preconceived ideas, to prevent us from seeing what
is in front of us. Some people believe that a chimp reaching for a banana and shopper reaching out for a
can of beans are doing the same kind of things. Thomas Huxley argues that no one would deny that in his
bodily frame, man bears “the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.” Likewise, none would deny that
humans are anatomically closer to chimps than the latter are, for example, a dwarf lemur or centipede. Of
course, this does not deny the potential differences between the great apes and humans. We narrow the
gap between humans and beasts describing animal behavior anthropologically, making it seem to be
human-like; talking down humans is complemented by talking up animals. There is a gap between
humans and chimps.83
Two lessons are leaned here. First, environmental policy should take into
consideration that demands close similarities between policies for different species. Second, humans have
special needs, but they must identify the demands of nature. In this context, the concept of environmental
pluralism means the fragmentation of hitherto unified traditions and of the coherent beliefs and values
that have derived from them. Its sources are manifold, and include social diversification and
disintegration, the rise of ethical consciousness among different nations and localities, and philosophical
skepticism about the universality of knowledge about environment. Moreover, trade and conquest over
the past three centuries clearly opened up the mind and sympathies to viable world views at variance with
one another. Now there is a “countervailing tendency” in the history of orientalism where plurality has
been seen as a station on the way toward a loftier unity in human intentionality.
In Indian philosophy, intentional is purposive and goal-directed. It is cognitive acts, or cognitive
experiences in the sense that thy have an “object” of their own, i.e. savisayka, although they may not
appears as intentional in the first instance. In the technical vocabulary of the Nyaya-Vaiseika, those
cognitive acts are not karmas, but guna (virtue as element) of a soul. A cognitive act is caused by
appropriate causal conditions, just as the cognitive act itself gives rise to appropriate volitional acts,
thereby making no distinction between the causal and the intentional, which dominates Western thinking
in intentionality. In standard Western theory, the Sinn refuses to be integrated into the overall causa
nexus. The samkalapa (intentionality), however, is just a first sign of the sharpening of the mind because
something else has to be revealed. Citta (awareness) is more than intention. Another important threshold
which Western translators fail to observe. Senart translates citta as “raison” or reason, Olivelle as
“thought.’ And yet, citta is neither reason, nor thought. Citta is used for the act of becoming aware. The
grandiose Vedic perspective, being cosmic rather than psychological, opens up: “The earth, in a certain
way (iva), mediates; the waters, in a certain way, mediate; gods and men, in certain way, mediate;
therefore, those among men who reach greatness are, in a certain way, partaking of meditation.”
However, beyond mediation, vijnana (discernment) is more than meditation, a word that would have an
important connotation in Buddhist ideology of knowledge. The discernment of spirits would be practiced
by Ignatius of Loyola. The general rule finds a ritual counterpart: nothing exists in itself, all is the result
of intention and actual work. Likewise, soma plant from the heavens does not exist until it is pressed;
81
Akas Kapur, Sen’s Development as Freedom in “A Third Way for the Third World” (December 1999). 82
Brooke Schedneck, “The Decontextualization of Asian Religious Practices in the Context of Globalization,” JCRT, vol. 12, no. 3 (Spring 2013), pp. 3-36. 83
Tallis, Aping Mankind, p.330.
24
filtered, and sprinkled y the sacrifice. The existence of the soma brings about transformation in the person
who with his actions has brought into being.
Is intentional self-conscious? Any given now-phase of consciousness retains the just-phases of its
intestinal object only by retaining the just-past phases of its intentional object only by retaining the just-
phases of its consciousness of the object. Thus, not only is consciousness aware of itself in retention, but
it must be retentionally self-aware in order to be aware of objects across time. This retentional self-aware
is not a form of transitive consciousness, object-directed intentionality; indeed, it is an intransitivity
reflexivity, a passive self-relatedness. More precisely as Zahavi argues, internal time-consciousness as
flowing in time; it is basically the pre-reflective self-awareness of the stream of consciousness. Human
acting by definition is state of any kind because it is dynamic, not static. While knowing that the door is
shut may be a mental action. Similar asymmetries come up if we pursue more restricted analogy between
action and perception, for example, between breaking the window and seeing that window is broken. One
starts seeing that the window is broken after light rays reach one’s retina; we cannot make an apparently
symmetric claim that finishes breaking the window before the stone leaves one’s hand.
Why do we differentiate the input and output sides so differently? The answer may lie in our
tendency to individuate by origins. Thus, we naturally group of both the early and late stages of the output
process into something attributable to the agent, while grouping only late stages of the input is intended to
be neutral between different theories process into something attributable to the perceiver. This idea of
grouping is intended to be neutral between different theories of the ontology of action. Since early stages
of the input process are grouped together into the perception of knowledge or perception, there is
corresponding bloc to conceiving it as mental. In short, if the causal explanation of the action cite only
mental states immediately preceding the action, it would omit those on which deliberation was based, and
thereby miss the rationality of the action.84
Sen argues that when a student gets education he becomes
aware of the need for conservation. Likewise, as Sen insists, if a woman gets gainful employment, she
realizes the usefulness of conservation, including ill effects of “global warming.” But the problem is that
an externalist mental state normally cannot be decomposed as the conjunction of purely internal and
purely external components. Sen’s causal explanation of cation is frequently concerned with the structure
of the agent’s deliberation. However, deliberation frequently occurs sometime before the moment of
action. In short, to confine the explanation of action to the instant before action is to omit much what
makes action as rational.
In sum, reduced to its essentials, Durkheimian sociological reasoning shows that social
relationship is mechanical and organic solidarity, but Sen’s cognitive propensity for philosophical inter-
connections allow us to engage with wider range of multiple inter-subjectivities.
Causation in Environmental Ethics
The above noted discussion leads us to the theory of causation. A cause, according to the Nyaya
theory of causation, is defined as an unconditional and invariable consequent of a cause. The same cause
produces the same effect and the same effect is produced by the same cause. Plurality of causes is ruled
out. The first essential feature of a case is its antecedence – the fact that it should precede the effect. The
second is its invariability, it must invariably precede the effect. The third is it’s unconditionally
antecedence is immediate and direct antecedence and excludes the fallacy or remote cause. Hus, we see
that Nyaya definition of a cause is the same as that in Western inductive logic. Hume defines a cause as
an invariable antecedent. Carveth Read points out that unconditionally includes immediacy. A cause,
thus, is an unconditional, immediate and invariable antecedent of an effect. The inherent cause, the non-
84
T. Williamson, Knowledge and its Limits, p. 76.
25
inherent cause, the efficient cause and the purpose correspond to Aristotle’s material, formal and final
causes. In this sense, the human intentional factor toward “development” for immediate gratification is
the immediate cause of nature’s destruction.
The developmental global design of the European Renaissance was the earlier constitutive of
modernity and of its darker side. Transcendentalists were like the consequentialists whose motives look if
the state of affairs that results from the motive to choose an action is better or at least as good as of the
alternative state of affairs that would have resulted from alternative actions. This cause gives relevance to
the motive of an act and links it to its consequence. It simply, “Nature” is the focal point for much
transcendentalist thought and writing. As a theme, it is so central to the movement that Emerson’s
cornerstone essay is entitles “Nature” and serves as an investigation into nature and its relationship to the
soul. For transcendentalists, Nature and Soul were inextricably connected. In the rhythms and seasons of
the natural world, transcendentalists found comfort and divinity. In the increasingly industrialized and
fragmented world in which they lived, the search for meaning in nature was of great significance. In the
USA, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), Henry David Thoreau 91817-1862), Margaret Fuller (181-
1850), Theodore Parker (1810-1860), Bronson Alcott (1799-1888), O. Brownson (1803-1876), and others
saw a possibility of liberation, and beauty in nature. Transcendentalism refuses to accept the Hobbesian
rationality that says all of man’s voluntary acts are aimed at self-pleasure or self-preservation. Of course,
Hobbes (1588-1679) argues that good is an object of desire, a term that must be used in relation to a
person. At least, although a subjectivist, Hobbes brings ethics into the modern era in the West. Hare
(Moral Thinking, 1981) offers a new understanding in ethics by arguing that universalizing of ethics
prevent us from giving us greater weight to our own interests, simply on the grounds that they are our
mine.
Cognitive Justification in Ethics
In his transcendental vein, Sen argues about morality in environmental justice that is part of an
evolutionary package with all our prized cognitive capabilities. However, the question remains: How do
we argue that we are all dependent on the biosphere like other life-forms, and thus, need to speak in
epistemological language applicable to both man and nature? The health problems in such cities are really
of environmental origin. What transcendentalists argue is that morality in environmental justice is part of
an evolutionary package dealing with all of our prized cognitive abilities. Indirectly, it implies that
morality imposes constraints on the pursuit of self-interest at an action-theoretic level. However, many
moral philosophers believe that morality imposes restrictions on the pursuit of social justice. The
deontologist argues that even the best outcome from the moral point of view may still impose further
constraints on the means that one may employ in order to achieve that outcome.85
Of course this debate
may not divert us from our central question about the environmental ethics that can be profitably adhered
to if not practiced. The notion of specialization in Indian agriculture the appropriate relationship of the
ecological factor occupied by specialized producers to the wider regional networks of production and
exchange has been raised in some historical works. The effect of uncontrolled population growth are often
compounded by the consequence of rapid urbanization in that led to widespread destruction of
vegetation, soil loss and a decline in productivity of the land-base in India.
If a revealed preference is not well-grounded, contingent valuation also does not appear to be
sound. Sen argues that plurality of values that we associate with the environment cannot be represented
by a single measure, for instance, money. A monetary standard does not view that there can be a single
standard against with relative worth of all other values can be judged. The real issue is who could be the
85
Joseph Heath, Following the Rule, pp. 101-102.
26
gainer and who is the loser? Goodwin offers a solution by arguing that the “green theory” of agency’s
autonomy should be subordinated to “green theory of value.” Clarifying the reasoning, Eckersley adds
that the green theory of value should be expand non-human beings to incorporate the value of agency’s
autonomy – the freedom of human and non-human beings to unfold in their respective ways.86
This
means nature is “public good” and the consumption of a particular person may not reduce the
consumption of others. In resource allocation, capability of one person may not infringe on the rights of
another. Distribution decision, Sen adds, of an un-crowded public work, involve conflict between one
agent and another, raising a dilemma in human rights choices in conservation ethics. Sen’s approach to
environmental evaluation has some similarity with that Marx, who captures the essence of the
development, defined most famously by the Brbrundtland Commission as “development which meets the
needs of the present without compromising the ability of the future generations to meet their needs.” For
Marx, the ‘consciousness and rational treatment of the land as permanent property’ are “the inalienable
condition for the existence and reproduction of the chain of human generations.” He insists that even an
entire society or all societies together cannot be the owners of the earth, they are simply its possessors,
and have to bequeath it in improved stage to successive generations.”
Following this sequence in cognitive understanding, the fixation idea is avoided by Sen who
argues that causality is not out of the point. The idea of absolute truth would become meaningless if there
is nothing to set it an art against or relate it to. The key to flexibility of real or true which is being widened
in its definition through comparisons. In short, the sunnyata or the Doctrine of Emptiness is certainly
empty itself. Bur for the philosopher Murti, “Negation is not total annulment but comprehension without
abstraction, and the concept thus calls for an inclusive attitude toward all, including nature and
environment.iv Gudmansen’s interpretation of a Buddhist hermeneutic can place a Western modern
philosopher in a refreshing perspective that may passes thorough the reducing value of changing Western
philosophical pre-occupation. Gudmansen’s contention is that Wittgenstein’s linguistic turn provides the
basis for a new interpretation of Buddhist “middle way,” which should replace the Kantian and idealist
approaches that have dominate the reasoning process since the Romantic era. Indian philosophers from
the second/third-century have found a way in which ambiguities and mystifications inherent in language
are replaced by a wider perspective, a process partly similar to the critical perspective of Nietzsche’s
critique of traditional Western ways of argument that says, “Nagarjuna’s (200 A.D.) dialectical analysis
of the common categories … by which we comprehend it are self-contradictory and incoherent.” The idea
of the approach to philosophizing is to get away from talking to one another in favor of talking with one
another.
If these arguments in relativity are correct, a persuasive case against permanent geological
disposal of radio-waste can be made on the basis of environmental justice and the uncertainty, inequity,
and lack of free informed consent of affected persons. In addition to this “middle way,” there are legal
grounds for arguing that the repositories are likely to violate environmental justice. Currently, both of the
high Charter of the United Nations speaks of saving “succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”
Within the Anglo-American legal system, property law also provides one of best examples of concern for
temporal environmental justice and for restraints on present generations who might impair the
opportunities of the future generations. If we accept these arguments, permanent geological disposal of
radio-waste is highly questionable on grounds of environmental injustice. These ethical grounds include
potential temporal violations of both distributive and participatory justice, inability to justify second-party
consent of behalf of the future generations, and threats to their due process rights.87
86
Krsistin-Shader-Frechette, Environmental Justice, pp. 4-8. 87
Kristin Shrader-Frechette, Risk and Rationality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
27
For Heidegger, the world can speak well when we leave metaphysis. Language as so conceived
does not pretend to be giving the one true story any more than language does in Rorty’s view. Narrative
arising from different settings give expression to being-in-the world in various ways.88
Sartre, like
Heidegger, insists that our daily activities are intrinsically social as they reveal our existence in a
community, even in the absence of concrete others. In disagreement with Heidegger, Sartre takes inter-
subjectivity to be the first and foremost, a question of conflict rather than of peaceful co-existence. Rorty
dismantles the correspondence theory of the foundationalist epistemology with the hope of finding a way
for the transcendental subject to touch the real world upon the world of words, but unfortunately, he keeps
the transcendental subject in place, making sequences of conversations after conversations. When this
transcendental subject, in the post-modern analysis, is deconstructed, we are again left with the world and
words in it. Heidegger, for instance, opts for a new relation to language altogether, one which results from
a meditative openness to the world. The philosopher Jim Cheney argues that although these abstractions
are fully intelligible only within the paradigm settings which gave birth to them, such abstractions can
achieve a life of their own. They can be articulated in accordance with rules of coherence and made into
apparently self-contained wholes ready for export and practical application to a variety of situations.
Conclusion: Evolutionary Environmental Ethics: Coping with Realities
Vast squatter communities in Calcutta, New Delhi, Madras and Bombay are springing up in the
peri-urban fringes of these cities. If the connection between the subject and reason can be established as
knowledge, then it will be apparent that those who desire to improve condition of justice for humans and
nature will cultivate the kind of breadth which is required for a successful exercise of transcendental
experiences, applicable to almost all situations. Urbanization itself has increasingly given rise to other
environmental problems affecting other areas. The high level of consumption that is directly connected to
the overuse of the resources of the planet and the terrible waste problems that caused global warming,
ozone depletion and our current destruction of habitat, all of these mismanagement issues has generated
huge physical problems that are bringing us to the brink of evolutionary breakdown. In an urban setting,
we live in a human-created environment, surrounded by other people plus a few domesticated plants and
animals, as well as pests that have overcome our defenses. Yet, we are biological beings, as dependent on
the biosphere as any other life form and we rely on our injurious animal nature at our peril.
Transcendental views are not merely contextual, because human beings are able to distinguish between
what is right from the wrong under all environmental conditions. My current paper concludes that
morality can been presented variously.
The concept of “positional agency” (Benedicte Zimmermann) and the notion of Sen’s concept of
“positional objectivity” have the same epistemological meaning. The idea of positional objectivity seeks
to criticize the illusion of an objectivity defined in the form of invariance with respect to individual
observers and their positions, and calls for a critical evaluation of both subjectivism and cultural
relativism. For Sen, the capability approach shifts the economic debate from the generic individual toward
the person’s plurality raising a central question: the issue of generality and the issue of singularity in the
overall discussion about environmental justice. Understanding and Reason in which the former means the
empirical truth and the latter, refers to the absolute truth transcending sense, experience and directly
perceived by intuition.
However, on the closer inspection, the measure of human functioning misses a significant
element of well-being of nature and man, namely the affective value. The real measure of functioning
comes initially from our capability, but there are two fundamental approaches to measurement of both
88
Jim Cheney, “Postmodern Environmental Ethics: Ethics as Bioregional Narrative,” Environmental Ethics, p. 119.
28
capability and functioning (Sen). Our functioning that we choose in conservation is ipso facto, being the
most-valued functioning, and yet, we choose a functioning for several reasons. Consequently, we must
rely on cognitive empathy that allows us build a bridge between our inner eternal transcendental
aspiration and real world of nature and man. If Leibniz rules out any real interaction between body and
soul, it is not just because they are contradictory in nature, one material and the other spiritual, but
because for Leibniz there is no possibility of any real relationship obtaining between two substances, his
own solution resting on what he calls the reality of ordained harmony effected by perception.
For Sen, the transcendental world does not exist apart from us, apart from our sense perceptions
because to exist is to exist first in our perception. The concept of “world-view” that was first encountered
among the Greek skeptics is substantially broader in meaning than the concept of philosophy. No matter
from what direction the thinker proceeds along the “philosophical road,” he must cross the bridge known
as the “basic question of philosophy.” As he does so, he must decide side of the philosophical debate he
will remain: the materialist or the idealist. He may find himself in the position of dualism, recognizing
two equal and independent substances – material and spiritual.89
Despite the reality that thinking about
philosophical ideas in moral transcendental philosophy looks unusual for the modern man, an
understanding of the differences between sensation, i.e., materialism and transcendence, i.e., idealism
used to be basic to transcendence philosophy. Indian religious teachings, in part, had impact on the
mystical elements of “Transcendentalism,” which states every individual has a divine source and must be
free to achieve its full power; that is the reason that transcendentalists favored social reforms.90
There is a
common transcendental philosophy: a conscious man is capable of improving the environment, without
any divine intervention. I have argued that deeply held Indian hermeneutical stance, one which the
judicious use of Skinner’s methods (Skinner, Visions, 2002) can help us better to understand.
Finally, Amartya Sen, a Nobel economist tuned philosopher by choice as well as his strong life-
long association with Tagore’s Santiniketan, Nature’s Abode in rural West Bengal, concludes that an
ethicist in sustainability of nature concept should be fully aware of the relation between pebbles and
human world and thoughts, between causes and deliberate action. Three mysteries loom large: (a)
physical objects appear to be conscious beings like you and me; (b) that appearances are synthesized into
a coherent common sense; and (c) that collectively we really seem to making progress to make sense of
our physical world and human souls making claim that we have “knowledge.”91
Transcendentalism has a
duty to decode these mysteries, and so far, analysts in the West and West have not come near to that
position.
89
A. Spirkin, “Dialectical Materialism: Philosophy as a Worldview and a Methodology,” http://www.marxist.org/reference/archive/spirkin/workd/dislectical-materialism/ch01-s02 (accessed 2/12/2014). 90
Alireza Manzari, “Contextual American Transcendentalism,” Theory and Practice in Language Studies, vol. 2, no. 9 (September, 2012), pp. 1792-1801. 91
Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind, pp. 350-351.