In this paper I argue that hope is best understood as a compound psychological state. When we take hope according to the details of this account, we are in a good position to understand why it is a political virtue of persons. I also argue that securing the institutional bases of hope is a virtue of state institutions, particularly in states in transition from severe injustice. And, finally, when the bases are secure, a person who fails to hope for the (...) political future is in that regard prima facie blameworthy. (shrink)

Convinced of the importance of framing, many environmentalists have begun emphasizing positive visions of a happy and healthy green future rather than gloomy pictures of deprivation and sacrifice. ?Gloom and doom? discourses foster despair and resistance, they worry, instead of hope and motivation to change. While positive visions are crucial, though, it is ineffective to deny that living more sustainably will involve any loss. Since people value many incompatible things, living more sustainably will inevitably entail both sacrifice and reward. Environmentalists (...) must help articulate new possibilities of a greener future without dismissing the value of what must be given up. (shrink)

In The Revenge of Gaia, James Lovelock provides a memorable description of what the future might hold for us in a world severely blighted by climate change. In this scenario the human population has been pushed to the high Northern latitudes: Meanwhile in the hot arid world survivors gather for the journey to the new Arctic centres of civilization; I see them in the desert as the dawn breaks and the sun throws its piercing gaze across the horizon at the (...) camp. The cool fresh night air lingers for a while and then, like smoke, dissipates as the heat takes charge. Their camel wakes, blinks and slowly rises on her haunches. The few remaining members of the tribe mount. She belches, and sets off on the long .. (shrink)

When I was five, a pond and thicket area down the street from my house was filled in and leveled while I was away. I remember coming home and finding my beloved ecosystem denuded of all greenery, and completely empty of the beavers and their dam, the minnows, the birds, and the countless rabbits and squirrels that had been a comforting and valued presence. I was devastated. Consumed and overcome by grief and loss. I did not want to eat, or (...) play, or go to school. I felt as though I had lost something deeply important, and intimately a part of the fabric of my life. It was the first time in my short life that I became aware of the fragility of life—mine and others—and from that moment, I found myself in a different .. (shrink)

It may appear rational to pursue short term self interest if the ecological crisis is unsolvable: it may be rational to fiddle while Rome burns. This is especially true when others are not making environmentally friendly choices and when we want to allow peole extensive liberty to make their own choices. This paper examines this problem by utilizing the prisoner's dilemma and Hardin's tragedy of the commons. It argues that voluntary solutions to the ecological crisis are not promising, while also (...) recognizing that governmental interventions are equally unhelpful. The problem identified is that it may in fact be rational to fiddle while Rome burns. (shrink)

The optimist may be secretly envied, but he is publicly despised. His pronouncements are regarded as expressions of simple-minded blindness or as cynical propaganda. Optimism is not regarded as intellectually respectable. It was not always so: there have been times when optimism was not merely considered worthy of rational argument, but was widely accepted by thinking men. Now, however, we react with a growing embarrassment to passages such as these: The time will therefore come when the sun will shine only (...) on free men who know no other master but their reason;… All the causes that contribute to the perfection of the human race, all the means that ensure it must by their very nature exercise a perpetual influence and always increase their sphere of action … the perfectibility of man is indefinite. (shrink)

Environmental ethicists often hold that organisms, species, ecosystems, and the like have goods of their own. But, even given that such goods exist, whether we ought to value them is controversial. Hence an environmental philosophy needs, in addition to an account of what sorts of values there are, an explanation what, how and why we morally ought to value—that is, an account of moral valuing. This paper presents one such an account. Specifically, I aim to show that unless there are (...) eternal goods (and maybe even if there are), we have a duty of self-transcendence toward nature—that is, a duty to value nature's goods as ends. This duty is owed, however, not to nature, but to ourselves. It is grounded in what I call an imperative of hope. The argument, in a nutshell, is that we have a duty to ourselves to (in a certain sense) optimize hope. This optimization requires self-transcendence toward entities whose goods are more diverse and enduring than any human goods. But unless there are eternal goods, such goods occur only in nature. (shrink)

Scientists and engineers often are not much interested in theoretical-ethics discussions. Frequently, like Harvard’s Cass Sunstein (2002), they propose “freemarket environmentalism,” basing environmental decisions on cost-benefit analysis and on saving the greatest number of lives for the fewest number of dollars. They say that when society overregulates, by emotively and irrationally rejecting environmental-risk decisions based only on cost-benefit analysis (CBA), it reduces manufacturing jobs, shrinks the economic pie, makes people poorer, and thus causes unnecessary deaths. To avoid these economic problems—that (...) harm everyone—Sunstein (2002, ix, 7) and others argue “for a kind of cost-benefit state” that .. (shrink)