Editors’ introduction to the Special Section: The ethics and politics of the Anthropocene

In recent years “the Anthropocene” has come to represent a new milestone for human-induced destruction of the environment. There is a widespread consensus that industrialization processes within capitalist modernity have ushered humanity into a new geological epoch bearing little resemblance to the climatic stability of “the Holocene,” the roughly 10,000-year span within which all known human civilizations were established. Furthermore, there is general agreement that the ending of climatic stability will have a devasting impact on the Earth's ecosystems, making long-term human settlement and global supply chains difficult, if not impossible, to maintain.

This Special Section aims to stimulate critical social theories to explore ways of thinking and acting that would equip us humans better to respond to the multiple challenges we face from the increasingly inescapable reach of ecological disaster. In all five contributions, “the Anthropocene” names a historical moment in which we must reconsider the very category of the human and our constitutive interdependencies with the other-than-human. Challenging the view that only humans possess intrinsic value, Arne Vetlesen calls on us to regard other-than-human beings as moral addressees in their own right. At the same time, he argues that only humans can be considered moral agents due to their powers of reflexivity, abstraction, imagination, and future oriented thinking. These powers make humans alone responsible for their actions. Although at first glance his asymmetric model may seem in tension with it, Vetlesen's argument resonates with Maeve Cooke's call for ecologically attuned  relationships between humans and other-than-humans, in which human knowledges are not deemed in principle superior to the knowledges of other-than-human entities and ethical goodness is not determined solely by human concerns and interests but has a partial independence of them. Nonetheless, like Vetlesen, she highlights the continued importance of ethically motivated human action, leading her to propose a reimagined, rearticulated conception of human freedom as ecologically attuned, self-directing, self-transforming agency. The proposed conception aims to break decisively with the ideal of the sovereign subject as it has emerged within capitalist modernity. Yann Allard-Tremblay makes a similar argument, urging us to recognize our embeddedness in the natural world while at the same time asserting our capacity for reflexive, responsible self-direction; he calls on us to seek concrete ways in which our relationships to one another and to other-than-humans can be renewed in their localized contexts. For Indigenous peoples, this process necessitates political resurgence and the revitalization of lifeways impacted by the destructive legacy of colonialism. In the case of non-Indigenous peoples, it may require far-reaching, transformations in relation to the land they live upon. John McGuire, too, holds onto the value of self-determining human agency, while drawing attention to its historical entanglement with notions of autarkic mastery and warning against the uncritical embrace of technological innovation as the surest means of meliorating ecological disaster. In the same vein, Karim Sadek contends that any adequate response to our ecologically disastrous situation is predicated on the human agent's ability to move beyond an egocentric mode of being that generates, shapes, and nourishes self-centered, self-driven, and self-concerned perceiving, thinking, and acting. Like the other contributors, however, he views the human capacity for self-reflection as crucial for moral agency and, in particular, for transformative political agency. His focus is on actualizing this capacity, which may involve painful work on the self in which individual agents seek to break free from the kind of unfavorable existential states that are conducive to a pernicious egocentrism.

Hardly surprisingly, there are many crucial questions toward which the five contributions merely point. These include the question of whether the very concept of societal change for the better is inextricably tied to a belief in sociocultural superiority. This question—often addressed as the question of historical progress—is central for critical social theorizing of any variety. It challenges it to conceive of historical progress in ways that do not simply reproduce the dominant ideologies and are not committed to an imperialist belief in the superiority of Western modernity.

A related cluster of questions concerns eurocentric biases. Yann Allard-Tremblay's contribution invites critical interrogation of concepts such as self-determination through engagement with North American Indigenous thinking on agency, in particular political agency. What might critical theory in the Western tradition learn from such engagement? By way of a learning process, critical theorists might achieve, for example, a more complex perspective on the strengths and limitations of the concept of the Anthropocene, a richer understanding of how claims to self-determination, and the rights claims associated with them, could fit with a nonsupremacist model of ethical and political relations between humans and other-than-humans, and insight into ways in which Indigenous activism could provide a model for ecologically motivated, effective thought and action within the cultures of capitalist modernity.

Difficult questions arise, too, from the apparent dependence of self-determining human agency, however understood, upon a level of material affluence that can be maintained only through the continued exploitation of natural resources. Vetlesen challenges the indifference of contemporary mainstream political philosophy, including the theories of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, toward questions about the ecological limits of material abundance that many conceptions of freedom and rights take for granted. But even the ecologically attuned conception of self-determining, self-transforming agency proposed by Cooke involves self-reflective, creative activity that has evident material and social prerequisites: it presupposes, for instance, a certain level of education and the satisfaction of basic needs for food, accommodation, and clothing. These prerequisites raise the question whether technology is indispensable in order to meet such needs. McGuire alerts us to dangers arising from reliance on technology. He unmasks the ideology of possessive ingenuity that underlies the tendency for government agendas to reflect the priorities of technology monopolists (Bill Gates, Elon Musk) over the needs of ordinary citizens. He also criticizes the uncritical pursuit of “novel” answers to all-too-familiar problems, particularly when the valorization of habitations beyond Earth comes at the expense of ensuring that the Earth itself remains habitable. In this regard, it is not easy to counter Horkheimer and Adorno's objection in Dialectic of Enlightenment that technology is inherently manipulative, essentially indifferent to the distinctive qualities of the matter it manipulates. An additional problem is the close connection between technology and unequal socioeconomic power relations. It is likely that advances in “sustainable” technology will benefit only the smallest portion at the top of the steep human pyramid created by global capitalism. To date, the promised transition to a “greener” economy has served to reinforce the hoarding of scientific and technical benefits in the global North, while the global South is left to serve as the site for industrial manufacturing and tourist-friendly nature reserves.

Yet another set of difficult questions have to do with the challenges to democracy posed by the urgency of the need to avert ecological disaster. Some political theorists argue that any viable response to the ecological crisis must be part of a democratic process. But other theorists contend that the time has passed for a democratic response to the crisis. Rather, the urgency of the task, coupled with its global nature, calls for strong leadership, “top-down” government and extensive use of the resources of state bureaucracy. This antidemocratic position finds support in the “Sixth Assessment Report” of the 2021 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which effectively states that climate change is now inevitable and that it falls to governments and other “strong actors” to meliorate the consequences without further delay—regardless of potential political or ideological opposition.

Does the Anthropocene have specific implications for contemporary critical social theories? Vetlesen and Allard-Tremblay discern troubling forms of anthropocentrism and eurocentrism within the Frankfurt School tradition. While such implicit biases are always a matter of grave concern, remedying them is complicated; important work is already underway in this respect. But the Anthropocene raises questions, too, about the normative underpinnings of critical social theorizing. The early Frankfurt School theorists relied on a broadly Marxist position as the normative foundation for their critical diagnoses and emancipatory projections. JürgenHabermas appeals to the normative presuppositions of everyday language use. His successors in the tradition tend either to seek alternative strong normative foundations (Axel Honneth, Rainer Forst) or to embrace a variant of Rorty's radical contextualism (Amy Allen). Cooke sidesteps these competing justificatory strategies by presenting her critical discussion of human freedom as an open invitation to imagine new ways of thinking about human agency and to seek new vocabularies for articulating those new imaginings. Drawing attention to the critically disclosive powers of Adorno's writings, she invites us not only to reimagine and rearticulate the idea of freedom, she also invites us to reimagine and rearticulate pathways for social critique.