Ethics and Environmental Policy in Democratic Governance: John Rawls, Public Reason, and Normative Precommitment

Abstract

Probably no philosopher of the twentieth century has had a greater impact on democratic theory and ethics than John Rawls, but his direct influence on environmental policy and ethics has been minimal. Rawls's theory calls for "normative precommitment," meaning that in a democracy people should agree on fundamental normative choices before they take account of their own stakes in later decision processes. Independently of Rawls, environmental policy has repeatedly hit upon normative precommitment as a strategy in campaigns for clean water, protecting endangered species, and climate change. Policymakers find normative precommit-ment an attractive approach because it combines moral sensibility about the environment with potent symbolic politics, but the value of this strategy is attenuated because policy debate and the policy research literature have no philosophical grounding in terms of governance or democratic theory. This is what Rawls provides. His approach will always require too much of society to be useful in deciding "every-day" matters, but it is most valuable in thinking about the big questions of environmental politics and policy, the ones that involve fundamental considerations.