The Politics of the Environment: Ideas, Activism, Policy, 2nd Edition

THEORY

3.8 Defining social justice

Social justice is concerned with the principles

that should govern the basic structure of a

society, including the regulation of the legal

system, the economy and welfare policy.

Theories of social justice generally deal with the

distribution of rights, opportunities and

resources among human beings.

There are many competing accounts of

justice with distribution based variously on

principles such as needs, desert, entitlement,

utility and equality. A broad division can be

identified in modern theories of justice between

those which link justice to some notion of

equality and those which link it to entitlements,

or rights. By defining social justice in terms of

social and economic equality, greens adopt a

socialist or welfare-state liberal conception of

justice. By contrast, Nozick ( 1974 ) argues that

justice requires that we get the things that we

are entitled to – because we have, say, a right

to property. If that means some people get

more than others, then so be it, because

Nozick does not think that inequalities arein

themselvesunjust. However, not all who define

justice by reference to rights are anti-egalitarian

(e.g. Benton 1993 ).

Theories of social justice have, until recently,

been largely silent about environmental issues.

This is partly explicable by reference to the indi-

vidualism inherent in liberal theories of justice.

The problem here is that environmental goods –

the reduction of acid rain or preservation of an

endangered species – are not normally

distributed to individuals. Yet most policies

intended to protect the environment will have

distributional implications, perhaps because

they will require public expenditure or involve

restrictions on the behaviour of individuals (car

drivers or hunters), and they will certainly affect

some people more than others (Miller 1999 ).

However, even when modern theories of

justice are not individualistic, they are

nevertheless anthropocentric in that they

explicate value as value for and to human

beings (whether individually or collectively).

They therefore have difficulty in explaining the

intuition that nature might have either inherent

or intrinsic value.

First, some greens base their commitment to equality on a lesson from

nature (Dobson 2000 : 22). The holistic message is that nature consists of

amass of interdependent entities with each part having some value to

other parts. Therefore no part is independent of, or superior to, any other

part; hence the principle of equality (Dobson 2000 : 24). Aside from the

weaknesses in the holistic case discussed in Chapter2,itishardtosee

why interdependence necessarily implies equality. After all, there are many

interdependent human relationships (employer/employee, landlord/villein,

teacher/pupil) where equality would not normally exist. In short, the argu-

ment from nature is fundamentally flawed.

Secondly, social injustice contributes to environmental degradation. There

is little doubt, for example, that poverty in less developed nations, by encour-

aging over-intensive farming and the cultivation of marginal land, results in

environmental problems such as desertification and deforestation. Economic

inequality between North and South is underpinned by an international

trading system that encourages less developed countries to produce cash

crops for Northern consumption (rather than developing a self-sufficient

economy), primarily to pay off debts to those same countries and their