questions raised for other purposes. Here again, thanks to them,
means become ends.^49 The moralists protect the disrupters, the ac-
tors, the recalcitrant parties, with an inviolable right of asylum.
In the old framework, the moralists cut rather a sorry figure, since
the world was full of amoral nature and society was full of immoral vi-
olence. They could only threaten the secular order with recourse to a
transcendent world, cling exclusively to formal procedures, or aban-
don all pretension and calculate with the others while using a different
quantumof happiness and pain. In the new framework, they hold an
essential place, since there are no longer an inside and an outside de-
fined by essence, but a slow work of externalization and internaliza-
tion, provisional work that has to be done over and over again. Thanks
to the moralists, we can keep porous the fragile membrane that sepa-
rates the collective from what it must be able to absorb in the future
if it wants to produce a common world, a well-formed universe, a cos-
mos. Thanks to the moralists, every set has its complementary coun-
terpart that comes to haunt it, every collective has its worry, every
interior has a reminder of the artifice by means of which it was de-
signed. There exists aRealpolitik,perhaps, but there is also apolitics of
reality:while the former is said to exclude moral preoccupations, the
latter is nourished by them.
For political ecology finally to rediscover an adapted morality, it
was necessary to extend the fundamental uncertainty over the exact
relation between means and ends to all entities, and not to go seeking
a finally assured foundation in the “rights of nature.” We can measure
to what extent morality was perverted by naturalism—that of mod-
ernism as well as that of the theory of ecology that extends modern-
ism—while realizing that its goal is the exact inverse of the one it had
been led to play by being forced to protect the human from objectifica-
tion (or to protect the object from human mastery). Under the new
Constitution, the role of the moralists is precisely to avoid falling into
the trap in which they would find themselves with a simply human so-
ciety surrounded by a simply material nature.^50 With the morality of
political ecology, we no longer risk believing in the lasting existence of
such an outside or such an inside. If we cannot come to an under-
standing—politically, scientifically, economically—without setting the
majority of beings aside, thanks to morality, outcasts will be able to
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