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polarized between two broad varieties: the “instrumental” approach that attaches ... of the environment to human interests; and the “intrinsic value” approach that ...
marion hourdequin and david b. wong

A RELATIONAL APPROACH TO ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS Introduction Fundamental approaches to environmental ethics currently seem polarized between two broad varieties: the “instrumental” approach that attaches value to the environment based solely on the relevance of the environment to human interests; and the “intrinsic value” approach that attaches value to the environment independently of human interests. The first approach obviously has a broader potential audience and is invoked even by intrinsic value advocates when they seek to marshal the broadest possible support for environmental protection. For intrinsic value advocates, however, the instrumentalist approach has obvious limitations. It permits damage to the environment whenever required by the balance of human interests. Not the environment, a particular animal or plant, or biodiversity per se has any value according to instrumentalism; each has value only insofar as it provides economic, medicinal, aesthetic, or other benefits to human beings. Practically speaking, instrumentalism may not be the best way to achieve the protection of common goods, such as clean running streams, since the benefits to human beings may be diffuse, indirect, and difficult to quantify.1 More fundamentally, the instrumental approach cannot directly account for harm to nonhuman animals, streams, or forests.2 Yet those who defend intrinsic value argue that things other-than-human—sentient beings3, any organism that is “a teleological center of life,”4 or ecological communities5— have value in and of themselves. To instrumentalists, the idea that the environment has intrinsic value often appears inscrutable or flaky. Many instrumentalists are naturalistic in their conceptions of value; that is, they hold that there

MARION HOURDEQUIN, Ph. D. candidate, Department of Philosophy, Duke University. Specialties: ethics, comparative ethics, philosophy of biology. E-mail: marion. [email protected]. DAVID B. WONG, professor, Department of Philosophy, Duke University. Specialties: ethical theory, comparative ethics, Chinese philosophy. E-mail: [email protected] Journal of Chinese Philosophy 32:1 (March 2005) 19–33 © 2005 Journal of Chinese Philosophy

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is no value without a sentient being with values or interests in relation to which other things have value. Other instrumentalists operate from the very different assumption that the nonhuman world has been created and given to human beings for their use. The notion that things can have value independently of valuers simply has no hold on instrumentalists, and it is unclear what intrinsic value advocates can say to change their minds. In the first section of this article, we extract from Chinese classical philosophy a relational conception of self that shows how other individuals enter into the identities of human beings. In the second section, we extend this relational conception, drawing on Confucian, Western Apache, and Inuit traditions to explain how the nonhuman world can enter into human identities. This broadened relational conception offers an alternative to the instrumentalist and intrinsic value approaches to environmental ethics. It justifies broadening the scope of concern beyond that offered by the first approach, but it does not require the controversial commitments of the second. In the third section of this article, we present examples of the way that the relational self grounds responsibility and accountability to environment. In the fourth section, we formulate and reply to an objection to our approach, showing how the relational approach accommodates the insights of cosmopolitanism without giving up the local and placebased aspects of human identity.

1. The Relational Self and Classical Chinese Philosophy The seeds of the relational approach to environmental ethics can be found in many traditions, but key elements emerge from influential interpretations of classical Chinese philosophy that attribute to it a relational conception of the self. David Hall and Roger Ames, and Henry Rosemont, Jr., for example, have argued that in the Chinese conception, the self is constituted by its relationships.6 As Rosemont puts it, “there can be no me in isolation, to be considered abstractly: I am the totality of roles I live in relation to specific others . . .”7 Such a relational conception, however, requires interpretation. If the self is constituted by its relationships, how are we to conceive of the entity that stands in these relationships? One way to interpret this relational conception of the self is to conceive of the “one” who stands in relationships as simply a biological organism who is not yet a person until she enters into relationships with others. The Mencius holds that the distinctively human capacities to enter into relationships are ethical in content, and that anyone lacking the four innate “beginnings” of goodness—the feelings of

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compassion, shame, and courtesy and a sense of right and wrong—is said not to be human (2A6). Realizing one’s humanity, in other words, is realizing those inborn capacities to enter into a network of responsibilities one has toward others and others have toward oneself. This is an important sense in which personhood is relational in nature, but it is not a sense that explains how our identities as particular persons are constituted by our relationships. Another sense in which persons are relational is that who we become is very much influenced by our relationships to particular others. Confucianism emphasizes, for instance, the importance of teachers who know what we need as individuals, as illustrated by Analects 11.22. Confucius advises Zilu to consult father and elder brother in answer to the question, “Should one immediately practice what one has heard?” When the same question is posed by Ran You, Confucius answers that one should immediately practice what one has heard. In explaining his differing answers, Confucius says that Ran You was retiring and needed urging forward, while Zilu had more than one man’s energy and needed to be kept back. That our development as persons is deeply influenced by others is an important truth about human beings, but it does not show how our identities are intrinsically relational. For the latter to be true, we need not only for our constituting traits to be developed in relationship with others but also to be constituted by our relationship to others. We get closer to a constitutive sense of identity when we acknowledge the fact that many of our traits include dispositions that are triggered by specific persons in specific social contexts. To say what these traits are, then, we must say which people in which contexts trigger the relevant dispositions. For example, people might manifest certain traits, such as warmth and generosity, to family and close friends, but manifest very different ones to those with whom they work. Perhaps, then, other people may be thought to constitute one’s identity if these others form part of the context in terms of which one’s constituting traits are specified. I am not warm and generous simpliciter but warm and generous to certain people, and other ways to other people. If warmth and generosity are part of who I am, then so are the people to whom I am warm and generous. Who I am partly depends on the situation I am in and on the company I am keeping.8 Confucianism acknowledges not only the context dependence of many of our traits but also the ethical necessity for context dependence of the right sort. We have in mind here the theme that no general rule can be taken as an absolute, often associated with yi, often translated as ‘rightness’ when applied to acts and as ‘righteousness’ when applied to a virtue of persons. Consider 4.10, where the Master says, “In his dealings with the world the gentleman is not invariably for or

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against anything. He is on the side of what is yi.” The fact that what is yi is not invariably identified with any type of action except itself suggests that there can be no invariable rule that defines what is right. It depends on the circumstances. The kind of ethical knowledge valued in the Analects cannot be fully captured in any a set of general principles telling us what to do, because no set of principles could guide us through the particularity of circumstance that each situation in life presents to us. One has to develop a kind of judgment about what to do in this or that situation that goes beyond any rule, and one can pick up this sort of judgment only gradually, through trial and error, by making judgments, making mistakes, and learning from these mistakes. Usually, this process requires guidance by moral models, individuals who already possess good judgment and who can point out to us when we ourselves have made good or bad judgments. The kinds of persons we are, then, should according to Confucianism depend on context, and in this sense, our identities are multifariously related to the particular people with whom we interact and have relationships, and to the various situations in which we are called upon to act in different ways. In Analects 10.1, Confucius is described as submissive and seemingly inarticulate in the local community, while fluent in the ancestral temple and at court, though he did not speak lightly. In 10.2, he is described as affable at court with Counselors of lower rank, frank though respectful with Counselors of upper rank, and respectful and composed when with his lord.9 There is one significant class of exceptions to the relational nature of identity, and that, interestingly, is illustrated by the virtue of yi itself. Considered as the trait of reliably doing what is right, it is the trait of sensitivity to what each context calls for, but as such a trait, it is itself not context dependent. That is, reliably identifying and acting in accordance with what each context requires is itself a trait that does not vary with context. Such a trait is a rare accomplishment, since virtually all of us fail to act rightly in some circumstances, even if most of us manage to act somewhat decently in “normal” or familiar contexts. Much “situational” psychology draws our attention to this fact about most people. For example, the Milgram experiment showed that the majority of subjects were willing to administer severe and dangerous electric shocks to test the effect of punishment on learning. The situational variable thought to be responsible for the surprising willingness to hurt others was the authority of the experimenter in charge.10 The person with yi, on the other hand, will not show these ethical inconsistencies. Thus the different ways that Confucius related to his local community and to people of various ranks at court all presum-

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ably went into his acting rightly. While his traits of being frank or reserved seem very much context dependent and highly relational, his trait of acting rightly across these contexts was not relational. Moreover, the possessor of yi—the Confucian junzi or nobleperson—can exercise an impressive power over context and circumstance, rather than the other way around. In Analects 9.14, when Confucius is asked why he wants to go live among the nine barbarian peoples of the east, given their meanness or vulgarity (lou), he suggests that their meanness will dissolve once a nobleperson settles there. The upshot is that Confucianism offers a conception of the person with many traits constituted by relationships, but also with virtues such as yi that are not relational, since their very specifications involve consistency of ethical action across varied contexts. Both the relational and nonrelational dimensions of this Confucian conception are relevant to our proposed approach to environmental ethics. Let us for now focus on how the relational dimension can be extended beyond the human community. 2. The Self in Relation to the World beyond the Human Community Many of the character traits of the Confucian junzi must be specified with reference to the particular people or communities who elicit the traits. This is certainly to be expected in the kind of human-centered ethic that Confucianism is. The dao for human beings, however, is conceived broadly, as part of tiandao, or Heaven’s way. In 3.24, the country is said to have long been without the dao, and Heaven is about to use the Master as the wooden clapper for a bell. In 7.23, Confucius acknowledges Heaven as having produced de (virtue) in him. The Analects thus recognizes the humanity’s dependence on an ordering force that underlies all of nature. Yet this dependence is not one-way. In 15.29, the Master says that human beings can broaden the dao, but that the dao cannot broaden human beings. “Broadening the dao” might mean that human beings actually create the dao, in part or in whole,11 or it might mean that human beings must live according to the dao in order to make it a concrete reality and not just an abstract ideal. On either interpretation, however, the saying points to an important role for human beings in the scheme of things. The second clause of 15.29 is also subject to multiple interpretations, but it cannot be read as asserting the superiority of human beings to tian, given the previously cited sayings that portray tian as the ruling force in the world. A partnership, then, is suggested by the text as a whole. Xunzi expresses this idea of partnership much more explicitly. The ninth book on regulations of a king says that

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marion hourdequin and david b. wong Heaven and Earth give birth to the gentleman, and the gentleman provides the organizing principle for Heaven and Earth. The gentleman is the triadic partner of Heaven and Earth, the summation of the myriad of things, and the father and mother of the people. If there were no gentleman, Heaven and Earth would lack any principle of order. Ritual and moral principles would have no guidelines.12

Xunzi is well-known for his doctrine that human nature in its natural state can be limitlessly greedy for sensual satisfaction and material gain. If human beings do not limit their desires, neither Heaven nor Earth will provide satisfaction (certainly a theme that has never been more relevant than it is now). It is only through restraining and reshaping their own characters that human beings can bring order and unification to the triad of Heaven, Earth, and humanity: “Each of the myriad things must be in a harmonious relation with Nature in order to grow, and each must obtain from Nature the proper nurture in order to become complete.”13 We must bring our own needs and demands into alignment with the sustainable resources of the earth, and to do this we must not only control our demands on those resources, but also pay proper care and attention to the origin of those resources: “When man abandons what he should use to form the Triad yet longs for the [benefits that result from] the Triad, he suffers from delusion!”14 Through conscious activity, the junzi produces harmony between human desire and the rest of nature, and in so doing, takes into himself that harmony. The junzi, according to Xunzi, is “the summation of the myriad of things.” There are other passages in Xunzi showing the beginnings of a view of the self as constituted in relation to the nonhuman environment. He stresses that it is not a human being’s nature that primarily determines his/her achievement of virtue, but rather, exercise of the intellect, guidance by a good teacher, and living among good people are crucial. This emphasis on the external world as key to realizing one’s humanity is presented early in the text through analogy: In the southern regions, there is a bird called the “dunce dove” that builds its nests out of feathers woven together with hair and attaches the nest to the flowering tassels of reeds. The winds come, the tassels snap off, the eggs break, and the baby birds are killed. It is not that the nest was not well made; rather, it resulted from what it was attached to.15

Moreover, running through “An Exhortation to Learning” is the theme that one’s environment makes possible—or restricts—one’s perspectives, suggesting that knowledge depends on one’s location in the world: “if you do not climb a high mountain, you will be unaware of the height of the sky. If you do not look down into a deep gorge,

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you will be unaware of the thickness of the earth.”16 The places that we occupy—social and physical—inevitably shape our perspectives. Insofar as what we know and how we view the world enter into our identities as particular persons, the environmental conditions that trigger knowledge and perspective will also enter into our identities. Environmental philosopher Christopher Preston recently has taken up similar themes in describing the epistemic significance of place. Drawing from J. J. Gibson’s theory of “affordances,” he argues that we come to perceive the environment and to develop a given ontology neither exclusively based on what is out there (in the world) nor on what is in here (in the mind). Rather perception and knowledge are relational: organisms learn to see what the world provides for them in terms of food, shelter, security, risk, and so on. As Preston puts it, affordances “are presentations of how the environment might offer a particular kind of engaged relationship with the organism.”17 Different environments make possible different facets of seeing and knowing, which Preston illustrates by describing his own epistemic reorientation upon arriving as a visitor to Alaska. Here Preston initially miscalculated distances (thinking mountains eighty miles away to be close at hand) and had to learn to reinterpret aural and visual signs (turned earth indicating bear diggings rather than the work of active moles). In learning how to act in his new environment, Preston had to learn how to perceive the environment and to construct knowledge from these perceptions. Preston’s picture suggests that developing one’s identity is a process of locating oneself in relation to the world. The traits of character that constitute the self-in-world are contextualized not just socially, but environmentally. The intrinsically relational character of identities is expansive, dependent not only on our connections with other individuals, or on our roles in certain institutions, but also on the physical world. Other traditions also exemplify conceptions of the self that acknowledge the ways in which knowledge and identity are tied to particular places and ecologies. Arizona’s Western Apache people, for example, use the land to orient themselves morally. Place-names have special significance for the Western Apache, and they figure centrally in Apache moral stories. When a person violates a particular custom or tradition, another person will often tell a relevant tale to this person, or to a group in which the person is present: a not-so-subtle admonishment and reminder of the violation. These stories always begin and end with the name of the place where the story occurred, and the place-name thus serves to physically locate the story and acts as a reminder of the moral lesson associated with it. The Apache often recite place-names, which are highly descriptive (e.g., “valley with elongated red bluffs”), both because they enjoy the sound of the

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names, and because these names are filled with social meaning. As Keith Basso puts it: [These] locations, charged as they are with personal and social significance, work in important ways to shape the images that Apaches have—or should have—of themselves.18

The Apache blend the social and physical worlds in their placenaming and place-centered storytelling. They describe the land as “stalking people” and as “[looking] after people.”19 The land is a repository for moral knowledge. Like Xunzi, the Western Apache do not see the capacity to be moral as residing exclusively within the individual; here, both the social and physical environment provide moral knowledge and support the individual’s ability to live rightly. One Western Apache man described his experience of leaving the reservation, losing touch with the land, and consequently, drinking and fighting with his wife: “It was bad. I forget about this country here around Cibecue. I forget all the [place-]names and stories . . . I forget how to live right, forget how to be strong.”20 Basso’s portrayal of the Western Apache suggests that both knowledge and personhood grow out of relationships to particular places. Ties between knowledge, place, and identity are prominent in many Native American cultures. For example, anthropologist Arlene Stairs calls Inuit identity “ecocentric identity . . .” with “eco-” “encompassing human, animal, and material.”21 Rather than viewing maturation as achieving autonomy, the Inuit see maturation as a process of “grounding” oneself in social and environmental relations. One develops personal identity through active engagement with the world—through what Stairs describes as “ongoing generous interactions, cycling through all elements of the human and nonhuman environment.”22 Focal activities, such as hunting, play an important role in this process. In the Confucian, Western Apache, and Inuit worldviews, individuals realize their full humanity by developing themselves in relation to other human beings as well as in relation to the broader world (tian for Confucians; the land for the Western Apache; and animals, people, and the environment for the Inuit). In the Inuit and Western Apache traditions, in fact, there is no sharp separation between society and environment. Instead of separating social relations from environmental relations, it might be better to say simply that on a broad relational conception of the self, acting well requires the right sort of relations between a person and the world. Let us address how the broadened relational conception of self bears on the value we attach to the nonhuman world. The nonhuman world may enter into who we are, just as other human beings and

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communities may enter into who we are. If we, as persons, have value, whatever is bound up with us ought also to have value. The Confucian conception of a socially relational self grounds the idea that we ought to be responsive to the particularities of the people and communities around us. An appropriately expanded conception of self as related to the nonhuman world grounds the idea that we ought to be responsive to the particularities of the nonhuman world around us. Because we exert some control over the environments we inhabit, both by choosing and by actively shaping them, these observations suggest that we be attentive to our relationships with people and places, which influence both our knowledge and our capacity to be moral. The relational approach to environmental ethics that we suggest differs from the intrinsic value approach in that it does not attribute value to the nonhuman environment independently of the value conferred by human beings and their interests. It starts from the relatively uncontroversial assumption that human beings have value, and asks what must be true for them to have value. Our approach holds that we cannot attach value to human beings or to whatever promotes their interests without attaching value to the constituents of their identities. We are not asserting that the nonhuman world has value only because it enters into human identities. Rather, we are identifying a ground for attributing value to the nonhuman world that we believe to be less controversial than the idea that the nonhuman world can simply be asserted to have value independently of whatever value human beings have. We do not claim the relational approach to be the only legitimate justification for attributing value to the nonhuman environment, but rather a justification that offers greater common ground for those who take environmental ethics seriously. The relational approach differs from the instrumentalist in denying that the nonhuman world has value only because it is necessary for promoting human interests. For one thing, the nonhuman world enters into human identity more deeply than at the level of answering to human interests. If the environment can shape who we are, it can shape our very interests. Our environments, as Xunzi points out, shape our sense of possibility and therefore our sense of what there is to value. Furthermore, the relational approach questions the very separation between the human and nonhuman that the instrumentalist approach presupposes. It is not that the nonhuman has value simply because it serves human interests, and it is not that we have to regard the nonhuman as having a value independently of our existence. Rather, the nonhuman can be so implicated in who we are that its having value is a necessary condition of our having value.

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3. The Relational Self and Environmental Responsibility What relevance, if any, does a broad relational conception of the self bear to an environmental ethic for modern, industrialized societies? One modest suggestion is that the relational conception of the self can reveal more clearly true human interdependencies that are hidden or at least backgrounded by the individualistic self-conception found in Western moral and political philosophy, and in contemporary American culture. One might reasonably argue that a minimal condition for an environmental ethic is the recognition that we occupy a physical environment, an environment that includes a vast array of living and nonliving things not created by human beings. The disconnection of human identities from the natural environment obscures this fact, as does the contemporary notion that we are in a “post-industrial” or “information” age. While it is certainly true that computers and information technology now comprise a major sector of the economy in advanced industrialized societies, “information” has not replaced manufacturing. Most everything that was manufactured fifty years ago is manufactured now; even if some of us just don’t see it or do anything to directly contribute to it, other than through our consumption. Industrial jobs have been outsourced to machines or low-wage workers in the less developed countries. Relational identities might help us to establish more clearly the ways in which our sustenance depends on the existence of clean air, drinkable water, pollination of crops, a relatively stable climate, and other “ecosystem services”23 that are easy to overlook or take for granted until their supply is disrupted. The bioregionalism movement in the United States takes this insight as central, suggesting that greater rootedness in place, greater involvement with community, and more locally grounded knowledge lead to greater appreciation and respect for the environment. Another element of the bioregionalist view is the idea that sustainability can more easily be accomplished at the regional scale. For example, eating local and seasonal foods reduces the energy use associated with long-distance transportation and can foster farmers’ engagement with and commitment to the communities they serve, as well as the community’s interest in sustaining local farms sensitive to social and environmental concerns.24 This last idea is crucial: it is not only smaller scale, more energetically efficient economies that improve the prospects for achieving sustainability, the mechanisms of accountability at local scales also play a critical role. Bioregionalists suggest that making visible the processes of production and the consequences of excess consumption can lead people to consider their choices in a more reflective light.

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Ecological restoration is another strand of the American environmental movement that resonates with the relational approach. Restoration includes a wide range of activities—from revitalizing polluted urban streams to planting native species to recreating areas of tallgrass prairie. One of the themes that has propelled the development of such initiatives is the idea that restoration can not only rehabilitate ecosystems but also renew individuals and communities by establishing more positive relationships between people and the places they inhabit.25 This emphasis on relationship and reciprocity permeates urban restoration initiatives today. In Durham, North Carolina, for example, the Ellerbe Creek Watershed Association is dedicated to restoring the creek and renewing the urban community as mutually supportive and interdependent projects.26 The Association encourages the development of individual and community identities that encompass the creek. For example, individuals can adopt a section of stream in which to monitor the water quality, and educational programs emphasize the connections between storm water runoff and the creek’s health, encouraging organizations and individuals to landscape their property in ways that promote absorption of rainfall instead of its collection in storm sewers. Restoration of the creek depends on people seeing themselves as inhabitants of the Ellerbe Creek watershed, as embedded in the hydrologic processes that include the creek and that are tied to vegetation, urban development, and human activities. The most ethically valuable aspect of an identity tied to particular people and to particular places in the world—with their animals, plants, neighborhoods, rivers, playgrounds, and shops—is experiencing oneself as accountable to others and as an agent with an active role in the world. In relationships, one learns that one’s actions matter. Relationships allow us to call one another to account, and connections to family and community at the local scale may be the first and best place to gain this understanding. It is this insight—that one’s actions matter—that is in danger of being lost in the atomistic conception of the self championed by some strains of liberalism. By emphasizing the freedom to pursue one’s own conception of the good life, so long as one abides by minimal standards of noninterference with the similar pursuits of others, these strains deemphasize the myriad ways in which each individual’s pursuit of the good both creates and forecloses options for others, and they overlook the ways in which the commitment to noninterference itself shapes individuals’ conceptions of themselves, and of the good. A broad relational identity, in contrast, brings to the forefront these social and ecological interconnections.27

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marion hourdequin and david b. wong 4. Does Globalization and Cultural Cosmopolitanism Render Moot the Relational Approach?

It might be objected that the relational approach has already become outmoded by rapid economic and cultural changes. Is it not a losing battle to propose bioregionalism or local restoration when many environmental problems are global in scope? Air pollution, for example, knows no boundaries, and chemicals such as dioxin and PCBs have been found in the blubber of Arctic marine mammals, thousands of miles from their sources.28 What’s more, our economies are no longer regionally centered. Is it not a losing battle, the objection continues, to emphasize locally rooted relational selves when the media have both a global reach and content, shaping people’s identities and allowing them to shape their own in a “mix-and-match” fashion? Might it be not only futile to propose identities that relate to particular places, but also harmful, promoting insularity and isolationism when we should more than ever increase the scope of our concerns and engagements? To this we say that a certain degree of globalization and cosmopolitanism is desirable, but that the questions of when, where, and in what form globalization is desirable take precedence over any supposed inevitability. Indeed, unreflective acceptance might make inevitable what is otherwise avoidable by individual and collective deliberation and choice. We also say that a relational approach has the resources for conceptualizing identities tied not just to local but also to global environments. To say that identities can be relational is not to limit such identities to traditionally situated identities such as being a person who hunts within these particular woods, a farmer of this particular piece of land, or a denizen of this particular city. A suitably sophisticated environmental ethic should recognize the need for relationships to one’s local environments as well as to everlarger environments that may come to enter our identities under globalization. The Confucian image of graded love, where one starts by learning how to care and respect within the family and then expands to increasingly larger circles of others, can be applied to identities related to environments of varying size and inclusiveness. One may buy fresh food locally and learn how it is grown and the impact of these farming techniques on one’s local environment. One might then become aware of the policies of one’s own nation in encouraging or discouraging sustainable agricultural practices elsewhere in the world, or of the way that the manufacture of products in another country and what one consumes can affect that other place for good or ill. The development of a sense of accountability to others, human and nonhuman, starts within smaller circles. One then learns to

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expand the circle of concern outward, in recognizing not only that distant others are as human as we are, but that these others are bound up with their environments. We learn that ultimately we too depend on these distant environments, as we too depend on these human others. In the first section, we suggested that the Confucian self has both relational and nonrelational dimensions. We have drawn mostly from the relational dimensions to articulate a relational approach to environmental ethics, but in fact, we have implicitly drawn from the nonrelational virtue of yi to express the idea that our circles of concern ought to expand outward beyond the local. We are not only members of this or that family, and this or that community, but interdependent citizens of the world, and we must act appropriately in the largest circles, as we must in the smallest. To become good citizens of the world, we need not exchange the particular for the general, abandoning what is learned in relationships to local people and places, but rather learn to take up diverse points of view, in all their richness. A cosmopolitan relational identity is one in which the individual is sensitive to a diverse array of particularities. The virtue of yi partners with the virtue of epistemic flexibility, which is something we cultivate through interactions with others of different cultural backgrounds, by immersing ourselves in new environments or by exercising our moral imaginations through literature and film. One of the best guides to the development of such epistemic flexibility can be found in the Daoist text the Zhuangzi. Within the largest circles of concern, the Confucian relational self becomes a Daoist relational self who makes the whole world her home. The Zhuangzi teems with singular characters, human and nonhuman, actual historical persons such as Zhuangzi’s friend Huizi, Confucius, Yanhui, an assortment of Daoist masters with amputated limbs, butchers, wheelwrights, bell carvers, cicadas, doves, and fantastical creatures, such as the huge fish that turns into a huge bird in chapter one. The Zhuangzi displays intoxicated wonder at the inexhaustible variety and richness of the world. The Zhuangzi often makes the point that our perspectives are shaped by our relationship to the environment, including our scale and our ability to move around in it. The huge fish/bird featured in chapter one makes the point that our human scale of existence is small compared to others, and we are left to wonder at the analogy of the cicada with the little dove who cannot imagine the flight of the bird when they must struggle to get to the limbs of the sappanwood tree. However, the Zhuangzi encourages us to take new perspectives, to see the world and ourselves as others, human and nonhuman, see. There is nothing that is not open to our embrace and to our appreciation. For example,

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when the character of Confucius refuses an amputee an audience because of his criminal history, Zhuangzi scolds Confucius for failing to act like heaven and earth: “there is nothing that heaven doesn’t cover, nothing that earth doesn’t bear up.”29 When the Zhuangzi tries to jolt us out of our narrow utilitarian perspective on things, it turns us to nature and to the simple enjoyments it offers us. In chapter one, for example, Zhuangzi chastises his friend Huizi for failing to see beyond the ordinary, humdrum uses of some large gourds. Finding the gourds too large and unwieldy to use as water containers or dippers, Huizi smashed them to pieces. Zhuangzi points out that he could have made the gourds into a great tub so he could go floating around the rivers and lakes. A suitably broad relational approach to environmental ethics includes the ultimate cosmopolitanism, where we develop our identities not simply by consuming foreign products or embracing different cultures, but by opening ourselves to the world and to the responsibilities that accompany the relationships this opening makes possible. A relational cosmopolitanism draws us into the world, and as we venture out, we find more to value and thereby grow larger. DUKE UNIVERSITY Durham, North Carolina

Endnotes 1. Christopher D. Stone, “Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects,” Southern California Law Review 45, no. 2 (1972): 450–501. 2. Ibid., see especially pp. 459–461. 3. See Peter Singer,“All Animals Are Equal,” Philosophical Exchange 1 (1974): 103–116. 4. Paul W. Taylor, “The Ethics of Respect for Nature,” Environmental Ethics 3 (1981): 197–218. 5. Aldo Leopold, “The Land Ethic,” in A Sand County Almanac (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981): 237–265. 6. David Hall and Roger Ames, Thinking from the Han: Self, Truth, and Transcendence in Chinese and Western Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), pp. 26–32; Henry Rosemont, “Rights-bearing Individuals and Role-bearing Persons,” in Mary I. Bockover, ed., Rules, Rituals, and Responsibilities: Essays Dedicated to Herbert Fingarette (LaSalle, IL: Open Court Press, 1991), p. 90. 7. Henry Rosemont, “Rights-bearing Individuals and Role-bearing Persons,” in Mary I. Bockover, eds., Rules, Rituals, and Responsibilities: Essays Dedicated to Herbert Fingarette (LaSalle, IL: Open Court Press, 1991), p. 90. 8. This suggestion for how to construe relational identities is developed in David B. Wong, “Relational and Autonomous Selves,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 31, no. 4 (2004): 419–432. 9. See D. C. Lau’s translation, Confucius: The Analects (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1979), p. 101. 10. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority (New York: Harper, 1974). 11. As advocated by David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames in Thinking Through Confucius (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), pp. 226–237.

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12. Translation by John Knoblock, in Xunzi, 2 volumes. (Changsha: Hunan People’s Press, 1999), v. 2, Book 9.18, p. 235. 13. Knoblock, Book 17.3, v. 2, p. 535. 14. Knoblock, 17.2, p. 535. Material in square brackets is from Knoblock’s translation. 15. Knoblock, Book 1.4, p. 7. 16. Knoblock, Book 1.2, p. 3. 17. Christopher Preston, Grounding Knowledge: Environmental Philosophy, Epistemology, and Place (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2003), p. 60. 18. Keith Basso, “Stalking with Stories”: Names, Places, and Moral Narratives Among the Western Apache,” pp. 95–116 in Daniel Halpern, ed. On Nature: Nature, Landscape and Natural History (San Francisco, CA: Northpoint Press, 1987), p. 114. 19. Mrs. Annie Peaches, quoted on p. 95 of Basso. 20. Mr. Wilson Lavender, quoted on p. 97 of Basso. 21. Arlene Stairs, “Self-Image, World-Image: Speculations on Identity from Experiences with Inuit,” Ethos 20, no. 1 (March 1992): 116–126. 22. Stairs, p. 120. 23. See Gretchen Daily, ed., Nature’s Services: Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1997). 24. See the website for the Great River Institute: http://www.greatriv.org/bioreg.htm 25. See A. Carl Leopold, “Living with the Land Ethic,” BioScience 54, no. 2 (February 2004): 149–154. 26. Ellerbe Creek Watershed Association, http://www.ellerbecreek.org, accessed June 15, 2004. 27. Deep ecologists have emphasized a process of self-development that bears some resemblance to the relational view developed here. However, the relational conception we recommend does not require commitment to the principle of biocentric equality (though such a commitment is not incompatible with our view), nor does it require dissolution of the boundaries between humans and nonhuman nature, as is suggested by Bill Devall and George Sessions (see “Deep Ecology,” pp. 221–226 in Donald Van DeVeer and Christine Pierce, eds. The Environmental Ethics and Policy Book: Philosophy, Ecology, Economics, 2nd ed. [Albany, NY: Wadsworth Publishing, 1998], p. 221). 28. “Dioxin Routes Mapped,” Science 290, no. 5490 (13 October 2000): 261; Paul Webster, “For Precarious Populations, Pollutants Present New Perils,” Science 299, no. 5613 (14 March 2003): 1642. 29. Chapter five, Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings, translated by Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), p. 67.

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