ABSTRACT
This article discusses environmental citizenship in the light of a green political theory incorporating the ‘otherness view’ of nature’s value within the conception of the political offered by political liberalism. In attempting to make some progress clarifying what environmental citizenship amounts to in this context the author also hopes to be furthering a project he finds philosophically interesting: that of seeing how far modern mainstream political philosophy can be compatible, at least in terms of ideal theory, with a noninstrumental stance towards the natural world. The aim here is to go some way towards understanding how this can be achieved in the area of environmental citizenship without undermining political liberalism’s self-image as reasonable and liberal.1 The notion of political reasonableness, and the salient elements of the otherness view are briefly described here (these are explained in detail in Hailwood, 2004), and then ‘respect for nature’s otherness’ is presented as an application of reasonableness to our view of independent nature. Such respect should be a virtue of political liberal citizenship, indeed of any version of citizenship emphasising reasonableness and able to acknowledge a non-human reality. In making this claim there will in effect be a rather brisk denial of some of the more thoroughly anthropocentric assumptions of contemporary political philosophy. However, some consideration will be given to some possible objections to it, including the thoughts that, as a ‘comprehensive doctrine’, the
otherness view cannot be a public commitment of citizenship, and that citizens can have direct obligations only to fellow citizens. Finally, there will be a brief discussion of some implications for citizenship education of treating respect for nature’s otherness as part of society’s ‘political capital’.
