- Environmental risk is currently characterised as a zero-infinity problem approached through market principles and values.
- Philosopher John Martin Gillroy, a professor at Lehigh University, USA, argues that policies shaped around this thinking are catastrophically inadequate.
- They fail to protect and empower essential human and natural values, which should be the foundation of policy creation, planning, and implementation.
- Gillroy draws on the thinking of Enlightenment philosophers.
- He offers a new approach that he calls PPLD – Philosophical-Policy and Legal Design – for addressing environmental risk policy and law.
When considering the environment’s future, it’s tempting to see it in terms of evolving technology solving all our problems. However, while technology may change, human nature does not. As long as humans impact the environment, considerations of regulating environmental risk need to factor in the complexity and character of human nature. To protect the future, we need to draw from the past, specifically the thinking of those committed to understanding humankind’s fractious relationship with the world.
John Martin Gillroy is a professor of philosophy, law and public policy at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, USA. Gillroy works to understand how philosophical arguments, especially from Enlightenment philosophers, can illuminate a more essential and evolutionary understanding of politics, law, and public policy. Enlightenment philosophers, active primarily in 17th- and 18th-century Europe, were committed to individualism, reason, and scepticism of traditional authority.
As long as humans impact the environment, considerations of regulating environmental risk need to factor in the complexity and character of human nature.
Enlightenment thinking significantly influenced the development of modern Western political and philosophical ideas, including the evolving concepts of equality, freedom, democracy, and justice. It therefore makes sense that philosophers of that time can provide a solid foundation for shaping modern policy, in their various conceptualisations of human practical reason and how these define moral agency, applied through policy and law, for example to the environment. While scientific method considers humanity simply within the casual context of nature, in Gillroy’s words, we must consider premises based on a fuller idea of human complexity to empower effective change in human law and policy.
The problem with zero-infinity problems
According to Gillroy, environmental risk is characterised as a zero-infinity problem, an almost zero probability of an infinitely catastrophic event. He argues that current scientific methodology alone cannot trace, let alone predict, the physical and chemical processes by which risk agents make their way through the environment and integrate into what could be called a ‘risk soup’, with potential adverse health effects for human beings and nature. He also notes that the use of market principles or values do not take the zero-infinity problem seriously or place humanity at the core of choice. Instead, he suggests we need a new set of signals that provide for an anticipatory state rather than the responsive market if the ‘external’ risk costs/harm are to be appreciated in policy choice.
For Gillroy, economic-prioritised policies that primarily focus on ex-post regulation of environmental harm are catastrophically inadequate because they fail to protect and empower essential human and natural values, which should be the foundation of planning and policy implementation. He argues that such policies only address a problem after the harm has been done, and prioritise economic efficiency over an ecosystem’s functional integrity, the moral integrity of humanity. They also lack integration and fail to address complex environmental problems as a consequence.
Essentially, Gillroy argues for a shift in the approach to environmental risk and regulation away from a reliance on science and positivism alone to incorporate Enlightenment philosophical arguments. Such an approach adds core philosophical principles to the comprehension of environmental policy, thereby enabling more effective arguments for what is essentially at stake in a policy/legal issue.
Gillroy specifically calls for a new approach to evaluating legal/policy issues called PPLD – Philosophical-Policy and Legal Design – for policy-legal decision-making. PPLD is a methodology that derives paradigms from philosophical arguments, applying Philosophical Method. The philosophical arguments chosen depend on what principles a specific paradigm highlights. In his research on environmental risk, Gillroy focused on the paradigm derived from Immanuel Kant’s philosophical principles, particularly his emphasis on human autonomy, intrinsic value, and moral agency; what Kant calls ‘humanity-in-the-person’. Gillroy’s PPLD framework can guide policy and law in a way that prioritises protecting essential human and ecosystem values, anticipates and regulates environmental risks, and empowers individuals to make ethical and sustainable choices. A Kantian Paradigm shifts the focus from reactive regulation to proactive measures that consider the moral integrity of humanity and the functional integrity of nature as the foundation of decision-making processes.
Anticipating and preventing future environmental catastrophes
By adopting a philosophical method of analysis, Gillroy suggests such a new level of investigation would illuminate the essential traits, principles, and dialectics involved in making policy and law, steering towards a more just, beneficial outcome.
While such a shift may be new and challenging, it is philosophically sound and better for long-term policymaking. Gillroy argues that a shift towards a policy foundation based on essential human and natural values can help prevent future environmental catastrophes by prioritising the intrinsic functional value of natural systems and the intrinsic moral value of humanity. He suggests a baseline function that provides three alternative but interdependent variables for consideration in policy decision-making: ecosystem integrity (in terms of collective goods), property, and opportunity. The baseline represents Kant’s argument that justice in collective policy choice requires governments to consider, not an equal measure of each, but the basic protection of freedom, distribution and use of property, and provision of opportunity for independence. By illuminating a baseline function that defines justice, policymakers can balance intrinsic and instrumental values; such an approach emphasises the protection of essential human and natural values.
Such a shift towards a values-based policy foundation would lead to more ethical and sustainable decision-making, reducing the likelihood of environmental catastrophes by considering the long-term impacts on both human wellbeing and the environment.
Furthermore, by focusing on empowering components that ensure each person’s freedom in terms of their essential capacity to choose, policy choices can be evaluated based on their power to protect the intrinsic value of humanity and nature. Gillroy says such a shift towards a values-based policy foundation would lead to more ethical and sustainable decision-making, reducing the likelihood of environmental catastrophes by considering the long-term interdependent impacts on both human wellbeing and the environment.
Current sentiment around avoiding future environmental catastrophes recommends immediate action. If Gillroy is correct, instead of rushing to react, we should take the time to reflect and rethink how we design environmental policies. But human nature doesn’t change easily, and therein may lie our undoing. As Gillroy wonders, ‘Can we “disenthrall ourselves” from established practices and theoretical conventions before it is too late?’
Shifting established practices around environmental risk will not be easy; where is a good place to start?
The first step is to acknowledge that current law and policy is actually based on philosophical assumptions. Policy-makers, unconsciously, work with assumptions about who the individual is for whom they are making policy, what collective action problems must be overcome to make the required changes, and what role the state should play in these solutions. I am suggesting that we consciously examine the philosophical assumptions we use to make law and policy and we start with three questions: (1) what philosophical assumptions about these subjects have produced the status-quo policy? (2) How does this status-quo (what is) measure up to what the issue requires (what ought to be)? (3) What alternative philosophical assumptions are necessary to close the gap between is and ought?
How could the success of such a shift be measured?
For environmental risk, I argue that the measurement should be how effectively the policy supports the dialectic interaction between the functional integrity of ecosystems and the moral integrity of the human beings subject to them. For example, we should not trade the functional integrity of an old growth forest for elective goods like paper, because paper is not essential to human moral integrity and can be produced using recycling or less vital resources. The hardest trade-offs would be between the moral intrinsic value of humanity and the functional intrinsic value of nature; perhaps between that same old growth forest and essential housing or the national security. But even in this case, having the dialectic of intrinsic values suggested by PPLD, as the core of the decision, would allow a full anticipatory analysis of the values and harms involved, so a conscious and more well-considered choice could be made.
What you’re recommending is shaped by historically Western thinking; how does this not limit its application to what is a global issue?
While PPLD paradigms can be derived from any comprehensive philosophical argument reflecting local or more universal values, I rely on Kant’s standard of ‘humanity-in-the-person’. This particular operating imperative represents the most basic, universal and fundamental element that grants intrinsic value to all persons. As a core or groundwork principle for policy it seeks to protect all human beings equally regardless of their place on the globe, or the details of their distinct identities.
Where is a possible weakness in your argument?
The weaknesses of PPLD can only be discovered by the trial and error of its use of multiple paradigms across multiple policy-legal issues. Currently, the greatest challenge is to get policy-makers who are mostly trained positivists to accept that the philosophical premises of policy-legal arguments are fundamental to policy and legal outcomes. Toward this end I plan to provide a handbook that would give policy-makers and lawyers ready-to-use, complete paradigm structures for a cross-section of philosophical arguments, set out for the non-philosopher. This would also include an accessible method to apply them both to decipher the foundations of the legal status-quo, and render possible alternatives for policy change, depending on the issue under scrutiny.
Who should be ultimately responsible for steering environmental policies?
The rule of law has different requirements for how moral arguments are debated and turned into persuasive policy, what audiences control this process, and what procedures are required to codify persuasive policy argument into law. The ultimate responsibility lies with those citizens, lawyers, politicians, policy-makers charged with informing and making policy arguments and codifying them into laws. PPLD is meant to give them a method for synthesising a greater range of justificatory moral arguments for legitimate policy/law.
