Rethinking Our Pathways
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Whose Sustainable Future?: Global Value Pluralism, Eco-dogmatism and Multispecies Societies View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Laÿna Droz
In recent years, “#ForNature” has been the slogan most used by international organizations in online communication when writing about environmental issues, including UNEP, UNDP and IPBES. At the same time, several high-level environmental governance documents mention the idea that nature is endowed with “intrinsic value”, “intrinsic rights” and “non-anthropocentric values”. The audience is urged to “act for nature”, to live in “harmony with nature”, and therefore to achieve a sustainable future. The questions of whose values and whose future tend to remain unanswered. Yet, when debated at the global level, these questions meet the context of global pluralism of worldviews regarding the very idea of nature. The move that attempts to place values and rights within non-human elements must beware from risking placing these values and rights beyond the scope of critical debates between human beings holding different worldviews. Otherwise, it could lead to eco-dogmatism and abusive practices against some human groups and other-than-human elements by naturalizing claims and imposing them on other worldviews and cultures. This paper reviews the scientific and grey literature and explores how we could reframe the question of “whose sustainable future” in terms of multispecies societies, while taking seriously the global pluralism of worldviews.
Climate Wars: Conceptualization and Normative Implications of Just War for Ecological Sustainability View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Laura Puumala
This paper examines the moral implications of mitigating climate change by forceful means. If the current state of the world is not conducive of current and future generations’ abilities to satisfy their basic needs, the situation might be characterized as an unjust peace, thus making it morally permissible to alter it by means of just war. This paper examines possible jus ad bellum justifications for ‘climate wars’ and their moral implications. Assessing the just war principles in relation to environmental sustainability exposes certain novel problems in military ethics while also emphasizing the non-ideal nature of sustainability ethics. This study is a critical reappraisal, which analyses the descriptive accounts on environmental sustainability and the normative accounts on military ethics to expose contradiction and to construct a consistent view on justifying forceful means for combating climate change. The first task concentrates on characterizing jus ad bellum principles in the context of climate wars, while the second task concentrates on analyzing their moral implications in wars fought for environmental sustainability. Climate change as a moral problem seems to make just war principles self-defeating in a way that renders them a hindrance to the moral values they are meant to advance. In climate contexts jus ad bellum principles seem to induce militaristic attitudes inconducive of moral determination in war and in sustainably mitigating climate change. Although, in theory, the principles seem perfectly applicable to climate wars, in effect they expose the morally non-ideal nature of climate change and novel problems of warfare in general.
