ABSTRACT

The concept of ecological limits is sometimes deemed a kind of natural determinism that unreasonably constrains a political community’s collective liberty to determine its own fate. Limits straitjacket political deliberation and action, undemocratically favouring management by experts. This chapter considers the implications for liberty of perspectives that either embrace or attempt to deny limits. The central argument is that recognition and embrace of limits, both human and ecological, enhances liberty of a particular sort, i.e. republican liberty as collective self-government among equal citizens. This chapter discusses two political values that connect liberty to limits: vulnerability and non-domination. Non-domination emerges from the civic republican tradition, while vulnerability has roots in republicanism and other perspectives, including feminist theory. Together, these two values promote a collective democratic liberty in contrast to the domineering, instrumentalizing impulse that characterizes the drive to transcend limits. Thus, while the Anthropocene presents stringent ecological constraints as we come up against various planetary boundaries, these limits do not mean that certain forms of liberty cannot flourish. In developing this argument, the chapter critiques two contemporary perspectives, ecomodernism, and transhumanism. Both reject natural limits in favour of some notion of collective liberty and self-determination but end up actually threatening liberty.