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Environmental Ethics: Amartya Sen’s Philosophical Concept of Environmental Justice

Observing the need for a transcendental world view of the environmental ethics, Amartya Sen writes:

- “Environmental sustainability has typically been defined in terms the preservation and

enhancement of the quality of human life,” (The Idea of Justice, 2009, p. 148).

- “Take adequate care of the environment around us,” (p. 48).

- “Take an adequately capacious view of humanity.” (p. 250).

Amartya Sen’s above-noted statements remind us of Robert Calasso’s (Ardor, 2014) observation

that seers during the Rig Vedic period not only wanted to think, but wanted to be aware of thinking.

Thomas Merton and George Santayana write that liberalism, communism, capitalism are doomed to

exhaustion. Santayana, who charts the destinies of Calvinism and “transcendentalism,” contends in a

skeptic mode that material “optimism is often compensatory.”1 Sen elaborates this compensatory notion

of transcendental argument to argue that the conservation approach emerges not only from the possibility

of competing principles but the assessment of justice as well.2 Classical moral philosophy appears to be a

normative activity that investigates, criticizes and establishes in order to conclude that it is not about what

people happen to think about preservation of nature but about what people ought to think about. To accept

science in environmental ethic as the last word is to overlook that which made science possible: the mind

itself.3 Henry David Thoreau (“Walden,” 1836) argues that foundational transcendence regards nature not

only beautiful in any aesthetic sense, but also a representation of divine power, thereby arguing for a bond

in relationship between nature and human environment that is being degraded by man.

Knowing that transcendentalism in general wants to reclaim the hidden power of human soul as a

solution to man-made environmental degradation, Sen conforms to the foundational ideas of

transcendental philosophy and epistemology. He reclaims the power and extra-ordinary beauty of nature,

knowing that many traditional practices, though essentially environmentally friendly, are inspired by

controversial “moral economy.” I would argue that by examining the persistent demand for the means to

environmental justice affecting social justice as well, being his core idealized emotional motivation in

life, Sen fruitfully analyzes the difficult issue in proportionationality that reconciles the dilemma between

his pet expansive theory of agency’s “autonomous power” and capability for a rational composite notion

in defense of his moral principles for the restoration of a balanced principle for the sustainability of

nature. His is a quest for transcendence that is behind the philosophical/ethical world view, largely

conforming well to ideas of Kant, Schopenhauer, Emerson, Thoreau, Yeats, Kalidas and Tagore, who

reinforce the moral imagination to bridge the gap between real and empathetic intuitions. Can that

imagination be presented as objectively as a rationalist would like to have? After all, valid knowledge

with its variations in purity, Cartesian dualism, and transcendental phenomenology, poses problems to

philosophers who know that American transcendentalist pioneers injected slavery and social injustice into

their moralizing values. It can be, however, safely concluded that currently environmental ideology

largely ignores that humans with virtue ethic in the equation that defends the truth theory of knowledge,

referring to the empirical reality as well as adhering to experiencing transcending intuition.

Statement of the Problem

1 George Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” David Hollinger and Charles Capper (eds.),

The American Intellectual Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press1997), pp.94-112. 2 Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press2009), p. 15.

3 Raymond Tallis, Aping Makind (New York: Acumen, 2011), pp. 341-347.

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Existing distributive justice in the use of environmental impacts is necessary but not adequate in

order to promote environmental justice.4 Often too much interests are shown with understanding “farming

communities” and their agricultural systems within their specific environments (Stephen Ellis, “Of

Elephants and Men,” March 1994). Beck argues that “threats from civilization are bringing about a new

kind of ‘shadow kingdom’ comparable to the realm of the gods and demons in antiquity, which, it seems,

is hidden behind the visible world and, as such, threatens human life on “this Earth.”5 He maintains that

scientific/economic “progress” in management is overshadowed by forms of risk produced by the very

processes involved in such progress.6 How to balance the African practice of implanting, for instance,

more and more trees with the current widespread planting of exotic species for commercial prosperity? In

Kenya, rural subsisting hunting came to be erroneously termed as “poaching,” thereby setting in motion

social/political processes of the gradual removal of indigenous decision-making institutions through

westernized state wildlife conservation policies and programs (Callicott, 1996, 2001; Akama, 1998;

Palmer, 2003).7 Thus, distributive justice fails to direct the empathetic bond joining two separate but

essential united destiny of man and natural object.

In this debate about possibility, a major barrier to a transcendental argument is the possibility of a

“pantheistic God,” who is self-conscious and reflexively self-referring without, in the process, needing to

grant ethical status to others, or even to recognize others as I’s.8 Moreover, many philosophical problems

are different guises of the problem of the relation of universal to particular, argues Roberto Unger.9 Purely

allocational or distributive paradigms ignore the “I” in the “institutional contexts.” In Sen’s meaning of

context, the fundamental object of analysis, as for Skinner, is what is called the “text in context.” The

recovery of such contexts permits us to study the relationship between the social and rhetorical change,

and the way terms that are both descriptive and evaluative as well as to foster transformation in social

perceptions.10

This justification for the linkage between the subject, environment, and what can be

proved, i.e., social justice, can be made by the knowledge step in the inference. There are three-fold

imaginative recreations of ethical possibilities that go beyond the bare sociology-based ethical rules and

their imaginative possibilities: (a) Those that are generally available in the agent’s context; (b) those that

agents could reasonably have been expected to believe themselves to have; and (c) those that the agents

actually believed themselves to have. These three are the usual such-and-such possibilities.11

4 Robert Paul Wolf, Understanding Rawls (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 199-207.

5 U. Beck, Ecological Politics in the Age of Risk (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), p.72.

6 B. Whyne, “May the Sheep Safely Graze? A Reflexive View of Expert-Lay Knowledge Divide,” in S. Las, B.

Szersyznski and B. Wyne (eds.), Risk, Environment and Modernity: Towards a New Ecology (London: Sage, 1996), pp. 44-83. 7 Santosh Saha, “Indigenous Environmental Principles and Resource Management System in Sub-Saharan Africa,”

Journal of Australian Association for Environmental Education, Charles Darwin University (July 2008), pp. 38-49. 8 Robert Nozik, Philosophical Explanations, pp. 54, 65; David E. Copper, World Philosophies: An Historical

Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), pp. 102-103. 9 Roberto Unger, Knowledge and Politics (New York: Free Press, 1975), pp. 133-144.

10 Q. Skinner, Visions of Politics: Regarding Method, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), see

Jonardon Ganeri, “Contextualism in the Study of Indian Intellectual Culture,” Journal of Indian Philosophy, vol. 36 (2008), pp. 551-556. 11

John Kekes, “Moral Imagination: Freedom, and the Humanities,” APQ, pp.102-103. It is a central concept in Hume, Kant, Romantic thinkers as well as Indian Transcendental philosophers, and poets. Sudhdaseel Sen, writing from a Western perspective, investigates how European composers have set to music poems (songs) by Rabindranath Tagore. The quality of Tagore’s poems is not the issue, but the impact of composers’ European cultural assumptions about the Oriental imagination, the exotic, the “other” on their strictly musical imagination that S. Sen chooses to analyze in fine cultural-historical detail. Alexander Zeminsky’s Symphony, the most elaborate and most faithful to Tagore’s sentiments that Tagore himself actually heard performed in Prague in

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Consequently, appreciating and understanding significance cannot be merely cognitive, it must

necessarily have a larger “affective component” capable of conveying the appeal to the relevant

possibilities had for the agent involved and engaged in most conservation principles. To what extent

justice is transcendental?

The ethical problem refers to the issue that says epistemology ought to focus on other mental

states, such as understanding. Environmental ethics and justice affirm that bio-centrism or eco-centrism

need to be coupled with the appeal to a kind of holism to valuing nature as a whole, rather than parts, such

as human beings. This is self-awareness with introspective awareness appearing as an interior urge, an

empathic experience, and a mental state. Two facets of empathy namely empathic concern for others and

apparent distress at the pain of the other entities are especially relevant in this context of duty ethics. In

environmental justice, ethics and values have guided the Indian moral inclinations since ancient times.

Zahavi and others argue that “embodiment” and inter-subjective empathy are two aspects of the same

essential being-in-the-world.12

Talia Welsh considers this interpretation as problematic, because one can

easily conceive of a being who shows what has been argued for as an embodied self, but who does not

display a sense of self and other-awareness (e.g., Non-human animal kingdom are in this category).13

Indian transcendentalist thinkers, including Kabir, Sri Aurobindo, Kalidas, Rabindranath Tagore

and Raja Ram Mohan Roy, face a dilemma in attaching values to natural objects as well as humans. As

we ask, “Why grass seems to be greener?” the next step in our “thinking” comes from Daniel Kahneman

(Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2001), who posits that “system 2” in our mind psychologically monitors the

output of “system 1” and overrides it when the result conflicts with logic. Kahneman and his scientific

partner, the late Amos Tversky, demonstrate that we are not nearly as rational as we like to believe. Some

conflict resolution analysts and practitioners of ethics (Jan Narveson, ed., Moral Issues, 1983; Marshall

Cohen, Thomas Nagel, and Thomas Scanlon, eds., Equality and Preferential Treatment, 1977), insist that

people of different cultures are driven by certain basic “universal philosophical” concepts to satisfy

human needs and demands for social justice without paying much attention to environmental ethics for an

equitable treatment of the needs of man and nature.

However, the moral quest is how should we arrange our working systems of economy and

technology to ensure sustainability of the Earth?14

This is an anxiety that is being reflected in

Hemingway’s (The Old Man and the Sea) message that projects that old man, the fish and sea are at times

in conflict but mostly live in amity; transcendence means which implies that “The Enlightenment” may be

shorthand for many different hidden enlightenments. In this relationship between nature and man, there is

a demand for equal treatment, but “equality” does not mean equivalence and difference here is not

deficiency. Transcendence stands for our imaginations of “moral economy, and thus, in Africa, the

Swahili words, utani, chama, ujana, and ujamaa convey not about simple farm management but also

social relations, which consider economic and cultural consideration in preservation of nature. “Moral

economy” is not traditional indigenous norm per se, as alleged, but is the norm created in response to

1926, see O. Joseph and O Kathleen, “Rabindranath Tagore as Cultural Icon,” University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 77 (2014), p.57. David E. Copper, World Philosophies: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), pp. 102-103.

12 D. Zahavi, “Beyond Empathy: Phenomenological approaches to Inter-subjectivity,” Journal of Consciousness

Studies, vol. 8, nos. 5-7 (2010), pp. 151-167. 13

Talia Welsh, “Primal Experience in Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy and Psychology,” Radical Psychology, vo. 6, no. 1 (2007). 14

Julie Davidson, “Sustainable Development: Business as Usual or a New Way of Lining?” Paper at the Centre for Environmental Studies (University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, 2001); Mark A. Lutz and Kenneth Lux, Humanistic Economics: The New Challenge (New York: Bootstrap Press, 1988), pp. 316-317.

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external forces, such as harsh climate, bad governments and more specifically, exploiting economy and

as it applies to things or on-persons in the religious texts.15

Secular technological progress has been seen

as the key to moral progress in sustainable development, but that also tends to reinforce aspects of the

lower human self, that is as Sen posits, the utilitarian, making and doing, self-interested, egoistic aspects

at the expense of the ethical, altruistic and transparent self. As Hanas Jones writes, “This functional

feedback of functional necessity and reward assumes the increasing ascendency of one side of man’s

nature over all others, and inevitably at the other’s expense.”16

This is stumbling on happiness, because

we systematically overestimate the degree to which good and bad experiences affect us.17

Counteracting the Prevailing Norms by Transcendental Values

By 1858, London’s Thames was overflowing with human waste, and the British institutional

measures ignored the problems because of the lack of social clarity, or sheer lack of appreciation. Lutz

and Lux argue that the neglect of ethical issues resulted in an accumulating legacy of crisis and disaster.18

In transcendental message, Pope Francis, in his recent teaching encyclical (2015), speaks in the language

of secular conservation principle, highlighting a moral dilemma because the current “development”

oriented policies have profound impact on both nature and the poor. He suggests that we unethically turn

to geo-engineering instead of hoping that humans will start reducing their carbon use. Even if believing

truly is a mental state in some liberal sense of the term, there is still a more reasonable sense in which

believing truly is not a mere mental state but a combination of a mental state with some non-mental

condition. Russel calls the principle as “the fundamental epistemological principle” in the analysis of

propositions containing descriptions.19

With the same motivation but with a different methodology, the

philosopher Ramanuja argues that devotional love is directed not toward a supreme power (Brahma) but

toward being with whom we can experience intimacy.20

We need, he adds, to combine the two

perspectives into a vision of “identity-in-difference,” of the natural world and our world. What Pope

Francis is arguing is that fossil fuels are the moral choice for the world. In the same vein, Sen argues that

we cannot take preferences as given independently of the debate about conservation that affects our social

choice policy, which, he insists, has a transcendental virtue ethic. Sen’s concern is to frame a view of how

we often act so that if we act that way our value is not threatened. Is economic determinism compatible

with such a conception? Sen observes that conservation crisis stems from implementing developmental

policy instead of counteracting the effects of greenhouse gas induced global warming, adding new

experimental uncertainty to our planet’s already changing climate. Theories of this type usually have a

developmental component built into them, for those most fully human capacities are ones that are not

mastered at birth or automatically expressed by instinct, but must be developed by interaction with others,

and practice over the course of a life-time. To that extent, then, the individuals continue to grow and

develop throughout their live, the quality of life is enhanced.

15

Cited in Veena Das, “Tradition, Pluralism, Identity: Framing the Issues,” in Veena Das et al. (eds.), Tradition, Pluralism and Identity: In Honor of T.N. Madan (New Delhi: Sage Books, 1999), pp.1-7. 16

Hans Jonas, “Philosophical Reflections on Experimenting with Human Subjects, “Ethics in Perspectives,” in K.J. Struhl and P.R. Struhl (eds.), New York: Random House, 1975), pp. 242-353. 17

D.T. Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (New York: A.A. Knopf, 2006). 18

Mark A. Lutz and Kenneth Lux, Humanistic Economics: The New Challenge (New York: Bootstrap Press, 1988), pp. 316-318. 19

B.A. Russell, “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 11 (1910-11), pp. 108-128. 20

Ramanuja rejects the notion of complete identity between brahman and the individual selves. The individual selves are finite and cannot be identical to the brahman in every respect. See Ramanuja, Trantrahasya: A Primer of Prabhakara Mimamsa (Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1956); J.N. Mahanty, Classical Indian Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), pp. 89-90.

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As B. K. Matilal expresses a fairly common view of the Indian tradition when he observes:

“Professional philosophers of India over the last two thousand years have been consistently concerned

with the problems of logic and epistemology, meta-physics and soteriology, and sometimes they have

made very important contributions to the global heritage of philosophy. But, except some cursory

comments and some insightful observations, the professional philosophers of India have very seldom

discussed what we call ‘moral philosophy’ today.”21

Ranganathan (2007) expands this by arguing that

dharma should not be defined in terms of its referents but rather in terms of the intention with which it

us used. In his terminology, a term can be defined either by its typical extension, its typical referents, or

by the typical intention with which the term is used, or combined thereof. The burden of proof is on the

intentionalist in this kind of case. The discourse, questions, judgments, inferences and arguments are

relevant to decide whether ethic is being used as the conventional moral term.

In the Yoruba religious/transcendental moral view, the land is a divine phenomenon with celestial

status and agriculture is a divine occupation originated by a woman called Orisa-oko. There it is

forbidden to cut certain trees, appropriate rituals of propitiation must be observed thereby providing a

spiritual check. Their beliefs are results of “deliberate instruct the ecological behavior of a community’s

spiritual value system. This is, as Saha insists, a non-romantic view of the Sub-Saharan indigenous

resource management.22

In Emerson’s understanding, the mental world is primary in comparison to the

physical world, which is secondary.

Transcendence as experience suggests that subjective/objective, internal/external must be

considered complementary ways of knowing, as both are required to describe reality. Plato, believed to

have conceived the concept of transcendentalism, argued that goodness could be perceived only through

intuition and insight, instead of logic or rationality. Emerson used this theory to contended that spirit

could improve the theory of correspondence. Kant, in his Theory of Knowledge, considered a distinction

between the world of sense and that of understanding; transcendental knowledge could be viewed as a

possible priori. The transcendental values have different values depending on the context. It passes

through several strains leading to interconnected environment and social justice. During the 1830s to the

late 1840s growing out of a divide in the American Unitarian church, which grew out of the desire to

negate Lockean thinking in ill-defined “natural law,” favoring the socially privileged. Locke argues that

religious perception is material and not an idealistic process that may not transcend the physical world.

The mainstream transcendentalism was also influenced by the Romantic Movement in Europe during the

American and French revolutions. For Emerson (Nature, 1836), nature is the material world, which is

one-half of the greater realm. Diverse transcendentalists, such as Emerson and Thoreau of the US, the

Enclopedists in France, the Wiemer-Jena Romanticists in the 1780s-1810, the Green circle of Balliol

College, Oxford, all have one thing in common – transcendence “inference.” As with the problem of

justification, the central issue in transcendental inference and rationality is not how we judge whether

what we claim to be an explanation is true, but whether, granting that it is true, it really does explain what

it proposes to explain. One implication of this would be that no one would gain knowledge just by

believing something that happened to be true.

Donald and Werhane present this type of consequentialism as a “teleological” system, and any

ethical theory which stresses excellence will also be teleological in another more classical sense, for it

will stress the object, end, or goal of moral action. Ethicists, who stress virtue ethics, do simply identify

more clearly the agenda for a coherent debate over moral issues. This transcendental virtue is far from

21

B.K. Matilal, cited in Shyam Ranganathan, Ethics and the History of Indian Philosophy (Delhi: Matilal, 2007). 22

Santosh C. Saha, “Indigenous Environmental Principles and Resource Management System in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Journal of Australian Association, p. 39.

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religious ethics, which codify practices as being religious and morally required.23

Thus, Sen suggests that

by destroying the public sphere in which abstract truths are established and can be tested and by reducing

the human world to an inlet of the biosphere, scientists as well as Darwinitics have taken away the very

place where objective knowledge could arise and be known. Darwin incorrectly informs us, argues John

Gray,24

that our minds are subordinated to the need for survival; we are not yet committed to discovering

the objective truth. But Darwinian selection does not operate on a full menu of possible variations, but

only on the short list of actual variation that occurs.25

It is for this reason that we need to look to the

discipline that has concerned itself with trying to understand the nature, basis of knowledge, in short,

philosophy. In Ken Wilber’s scheme, the “Self” is to be transcended, and object relations and attachment

to people, ideas, and one’s own sense of self and path in natural life are to be abandoned in favor of

attaining higher states of consciousness through the stages of contemplative evolution.26

It is in the nature of telos in which virtues must be understood as internal to various social

practices, and as such forms the essence of our knowledge. Martha Nussbaum clarifies by arguing that

Sen’s theory of capability has its legacy in ancient Indian transcendental philosophy, which believed that

all human beings are manifestations of Brahma. In that sense, everyone should have equal rights and

access to all privileges and capabilities in society. By mentioning Brahma, we need not suggest that the

theory of capability has its origins in metaphysics. Indeed, Nussbaum, Sen and even Rawls argue that the

theory of primary goods and social justice have strong reservations against metaphysics. Sri Aurobindo

and Rabindranath Tagore resolve the conflict between metaphysics and rationality.27

Tagore fosters a

mutually understandable discourse for addressing basic human concerns sensitized by the poet-educator’s

insights and ways of expressing cultural and environmental challenges in modern time. His man-under-

nature responses promotes environmental degradation because the subjects here attribute the process to

physical or supernatural phenomena believed to be beyond local human control. Man-over-nature

responses could promote degradation because of over-zealous application of technology to conquer nature

or overcome its many constrains. In this vein, Saranindra Tagore develops Tagore’s concept of humanity

as transcendental cosmopolitanism, which resolves the issue between cultural pluralism and

environmental norms.28

However, Edmund Gettier (1963) argues that there are situations in which one’s

belief may be justified as true, and yet fail to count as knowledge. The Indian philosopher B.K. Matilal

draws on the Navya-Nyaya (New Reason) fallibilism tradition to respond the Gettier problem. Nyaya

theory distinguishes between “know p and know that one knows p,” these two are different. The question

of justification arises only at the second level, when one considers the knowledge-hood of the acquired

belief.29

Thus, in summary, in environmental ethics, we face a new ethical dilemma. Both humans and

beaver make dams, but the beaver’s dam is a standardized species-wide imperative, whereas human dams

are the product of argument, effort, imagination, domination, evolving technology, ingenuity, and

perseverance. For some, an overwhelming case for feeling obliged to “see through” our differences from

higher primate to an underlying identity comes from the fact that we share more than 98 per cent of our

23

William Hawk and Gerald Schlabach, “A Short Primer on Ethical Theory,” http://courseweb.stthomas.ed/gwschlabach/docs/ethicsprmer.htm (accessed 5/7/2013). See also Donaldson and Proceedings Werner, p. 3tel. 24

John Gray, Beyond New Right: Markets: Government and the Common Environment (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 78. 25

Peter Lipton, Inference to the Best Explanation (London: Routledge, 199), p. 150. 26

K. Wilber, The Spectrum of Consciousness (Wheaton, Illinois: Theosophical Publishing House, 1979). 27

Ashmita Khasnabis, Negotiating Capability and Diaspora: A Philosophical Politics (Lanham, MD: Lexington Book, 2014), pp. 10-12, 15-16, 55, 58, 22-24. 28

Joseph T. O’Connell and M. Kathleen O’Connell, “Rabindranath Tagore as ‘Cultural Icon’,” University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 77, issue 4 (Fall 2008), pp. 1-7. 29

he Free Encyclopedia, “Epistemology,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology,” (accessed 9/20/2013).

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genes with the chimpanzee. 30

Dawkins argues that an estimate like 98 per cent in common does not mean

anything unless we specify the size of the unit we are comparing. It takes more than one set of opaque

lenses, of pre-conceived ideas, to prevent us from seeing what is in front of our noses. Those, who are

committed to closing the gap between two kinds of species, have many instruments,31

because the two

movements are merely different sides of the same coin. What affects the welfare of the planet affects us

all.32

Environmental historians, on the other hand, have demonstrated their the ability to invite insights

from radically specialized fields, such as ecology, geography, human rights, drawing a fairly balanced

model, depicting a constructive approach to conservation and preservation of both nature and man. But

this paradigm suggests that it is not that we cannot feel empathy, but we just do not want to.

Empathy and Transcendental Ethics: Inter-subjectivity between Man and Nature

Empathy may and may not precede sympathy. Inter-subjectivity is consciousness in the dyadic

model assuming that all human experience, including transcendental experience, has a valid information

basis, which is information, the pattern of energy, is the root of all perception. Inter-subjectivity has been

the constant theme in Indian treatment of trees, animals, and natural objects in general. The fifth-century

Sanskrit poet, Kalidasa, India’s greatest poet, writes,

“Making to tremble the flowering branches of the mango trees, spreading the cry of the cuckoo in

the regions the wind ranges ravishing the hearts of mortals, by the passing of the dew-falls gracious in the

springtide.” Kalidas’s mystical insights are just information, waiting to be interpreted. While we can

understand how human beings behave in relation to natural objects. For Rabindranath Tagore nature is

pure because it is free from commercialization and dehumanizing industrialization. It is both a respite and

an instructor. Tagore is not reactionary or opposed to the modernization of the world, but he is for

empathy between humans and nature. This has similarity with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s thought that the

spiritual world is primary compared to physical world, which is regarded as the secondary. As in

empathetic relations between man and pure nature, as depicted in Kalidas’s Meghaduta, or “Cloud

Messenger,” Tagore believes that the physical world through making humans aware of its beauty and

providing can be useful goods serving human beings. Such intimate wholeness is reflected in Hindu and

Buddhist religious paintings, called “mandala,”33

in which holistic understanding, of Kalidas and Tagore,

demonstrates an empathy between humans and nature of all kinds needs to include the inner realms of

experience, such as poet Tagore introduces ambitious experiments and criticisms of modern life, as he

founds an arts school (Santiniketan), a humanistic university (Visva-bharati), and a rural development

institute (Srinikeran). In Tagore’s Meghaduta corpus, five poems written composed over fifty years, the

category that signifies the Greek “apora” is called viraha, the longlining produced by a separation

between lovers, a longing that may or may not end in the sundered (cleaved) lover’s reuniting. This

30

Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and The Misrepresentation of Humanity (Durham, NC: Acumen, 2011), p. 152. 31

Tallis, Aping Mankind, p. 162. 32

Micheline R. Ishy, The History of Human Rights, pp.37, 67, 267. 33

Edward R. Canda, “East/West Philosophical Synthesis in Transpersonal Theory,” The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare, vol. 18, issue 4, article 10 (1991), pp. 137-150.

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longing, taken from Kalidas, becomes the mode in which Tagore relates to preservation of nature. Certain

forms treat all knowledge as empirical while some regard disciplines such as mathematics and logic as

exceptions. The empirical principle to integrate conservation with human development involves new

forms of human intervention and restriction on land and water use. Kalidas’s philosophical conversation

seems bound to shape our moral and public policy, which resembles Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass,

1855. This is invocation of aesthetic experiences, i.e. tensing our muscle while we look at a flying

buttress.

For Ramachandra Guha, both Western “deep ecology” and development projects in the Third

World countries have merely minimized the damage. In India, the same notion as in deep ecology

pervades in the Vedantic conception of a single self, or atman, similar to Schopenhauer’s ethics of

universal compassion. All these experiences comprising empathy and sympathy for other species such as

trees, forests, animals, rivers, etc., are good for people. Contemporary researchers differentiate two types

of empathy: affirmative empathy referring to the sensations and feelings we get in response to others’

emotions, whereas cognitive empathy is called perspective taking. Both of them are mindfully aware of

our predicaments in analyzing environmental justice or injustice.

For the model for inter-subjective empathic hermeneutics is a text in which words and sentences

give meaning to the entire theme in empathy between man and nature. It is an understanding of the

unwritten expressions of our psychic life, being the symbolic action of many kinds. In saying so, Sen

argues that each approach to nature-loving has something to offer, but only rational capability address all

relevant concerns. Yet, it is equally true that our ability to transcendence equality between man and nature

and an ideal cognitive subject reveals a deep tension in democratic theory that we consider as sides of a

capacity contract that pulls democratic aspect to both embrace and expel vulnerability. One side of the

capacity contract bases arguments resides on a threshold level of our capacity.

However, empathy in foundational calculation is a limited resource, like a fossil fuel, which

cannot extend indefinitely. What, then, is the relationship between empathy and morality? Critics depict

empathy as a source of moral failure. Psychologists, such as Paul Bloom says that empathy is a parochial

narrow-minded emotion, one that will have to yield to reason if transcendental values are to survive.34

Sen

and others argue that empathy does not rely on an outdated view of emotion as a capricious beast that

needs to yield to somber reason. Research needs to be directed toward identifying the lines of fracture in

value estimates. The method of enquiry by philosopher Yayarama (Principles) argues that centrality

given to “doubt” in action and self simply carries the burden with a Cartesian one. Raghunath’s “new

reason” as well as early modern thinkers reject a variety of reductionist hypothesis, and argue for an

“across-the-board realism,” which embeds even a scientific realism with a common-sense-realism to the

“middle-sized” objects of every day experience.35

The relevance of other rules cannot be eliminated. Without the existence of the other to serve as a

foil for our own refection, awareness of the self-identity is not feasible. Inter-subjectivity means empathy,

understanding what others are feeling because we have experienced it ourselves in other’s shoes, whereas

sympathy essentially implies a feeling of recognition of others’ poor conditions. Sen’s ethical form of

empathy toward conservation, and indeed sustainable development, has been in the form of circularity

that is arguably not of a vicious but rather of a productive type; it occurs because the expressions of

human life in question are composites that take their meaning from the whole of which they are part and

34

Daryl Cameron and Michael Inzlicht, “Empathy is Actually a Choice,” The New York Times (Sunday, July 12, 2015), p.12. 35

Jonardon Ganeri, The Lost Age of Reason: Philosophy the Early Modern India, 1450-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp.6-7, 125-127.

9

in turn lend meaning to that whole. Lastly, and more significantly, Amartya Sen concludes that for the

successful integration of conservation and economic development, the negative image of the

philosophical pattern and the realist image of development need to be projected in the “new” conservation

approach that looks for social justice. This human destiny in transcendental shape is linked to the theory

of inter-subjectivity, a theme in ecosophy. The debate here is that one plausible way that the

extentionalist can exclude considering ethics as a persistent moral term in philosophy. However, some

environmental ethics may look like they are doing ontology and not ethics.

However, language so viewed does not pretend to be giving the one way true story any more than

language does in Rorty’s view. Ethical language in the end is instrumental rationality giving expression to

the world in a particular view, and often it is distorted expression.

Ecosophy and Conservation: Variations in Empathy

An equal powerful notion prevails in the environmental philosophy and ethical cognition by

means of European ecosophy. As elements in finely balanced eco-systems, the fragile well-being of

people depends on the integrity of those systems, which are our present practices – burning fossil fuels

dumping of nuclear waste, etc. that are threatening. That same perception would serve to spoil the

traditional picture of ourselves as set over against the rest of nature. In a more exotic metaphysical

interpretation, the Norwegian born, Arne Naess, born in 1912, ask for “deep ecology” that speaks of

“integrity” of nature and our belonging to it. He coins the term, “ecosophy” perhaps drawing on the word

of Spinoza’s doctrine of “God or Nature.” Inspired by Spinoza’s metaphysics, a key feature in Naess’s

“deep ecology” has been the rejection of atomistic individualism. The “deep ecology” policy offers a

shared passion for nature, forests and mountains, all for the benefit of nature and people. Sigmund Kvaloy

and Nils Faarlund (1973, 1989), Witoszek and Brennan (1999) and Naess (1973), endorse “biospheric

egalitarianism” declaring that all living things are alike in having value in their own right, independent of

their usefulness to others. The deep ecologist respects this intrinsic value, taking care, for example, when

walking on the mountainside not to cause un-necessary damage to the plants, or Indian faith in barefoot

walk on “mother earth.”

European ecosophy is viewed in India with a new transcendental twist. Vandana Shiva, who is

much appreciated for her spiritual inclination echoes this sentiment by arguing that “commodities have

grown, but nature has shrunk,” and thus, she calls for halting the commodification of the natural world,

which has particular severe consequences for the human rights of women, “the poorest among the poor,

… because with nature, they are the primary sustainers of society.” Having entered mainstream policy

debate, the human rights have taken a good place in international conferences throughout the world.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), the German-American philosopher, characterizes the statement refugees in

the world as human rights violation.36

The sociological model in conservation policy goes too far to

suggest that environmental justice is irrelevant to well-being of human beings. Our emotions are not

always well suited to the decision we take in modern conservation. It is important to know how our

emotions lead us astray so that we can design incentives to help compensate for “our irrational biases.”37

Social assessment methods in environmental issues have been made by the World Bank for beneficiary

evaluations, participatory poverty assessments, and social assessments.38

In that sense, plurality serves the

interests of varied environmental needs. The Greek and Indian traditions of ethical philosophy both

36

Raghunatha Siromani, Inquiry into the Time Nature of Things (ed.), V.P. Dvivedi (Varanasi: Maha Mandalya Publishers, 1915). 37

W.D. Casbeer, Natural Ethical Facts: Evolution, Connectionism, and Moral Cognition (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003); cited in Lehrer, The Psychology of Subprime Mortgage.” 38

In contrast, Hart asks, “Does it pay to be Green, see S. Hart and G. Ahuja, “Does it Pay to be Green,” Business Strategy and the Environment, vol. 5 1996), pp. 30-37.

10

emphasize the significance of transcendental emotion as performing ecosophy. For both, the ideal ethical

state is conceived as imperturbability or detachment.

In the Democritean lineage as much as in some Buddhist schools, the ethical implications of the

principle of impermanence is fundamental. Plato, for example, teaches in the Timaeus, a rationale for

ethics that is identical to the thought underlying the “Four Noble Truths” (of Buddhism). Protagoras

argues that humans had long ago lived not in a Golden Age but in a state like that of animals, from which,

through long application of technological wit, they had risen to the condition of urban civilization.

Interestingly, in agreement with the naturalistic thread of Greco-Roman thought, the Indian philosopher

Uddalaka in the Chnadogya Upanishad, teaches that living according to “Nature” brings human

satisfaction. The materialist Carvaka School similarly teaches that the soul is produced accidentally by

atomic arrangements and will disintegrate and be reprocessed though “Nature,” atom by atom, after the

death of the body.39

However, an argumentative tradition prevails in attaching morals to both ecosophy

and transcendental norms applicable to men and nature.

First, in many publications, Descartes’ and Bacon’s licenses for us to “command” and “master”

nature, are cited in the confirmation of the conspiracy between dualist metaphysics and environmental

domination. For many environmentalists, the antidote is a robust naturalism, which portrays human

beings as made of the same physical stuff and subject to the same causal processes as everything else in

nature, but adds to an ecological perspective. This appears to be developing empiricism in ethics that is

attacked by the Greek thinker, Parmenides, who regards “reason” alone as the test of a theory. In India,

likewise, the philosopher Shankar accuses the Buddhists of applying such emotional device in an

illegitimate way. Shankar emphasizes that the Veda itself adjust to the teachings of different levels of

understanding and qualification. He addresses different levels of interest and capabilities, and yet, the idea

was restrictive. Thus, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, we find it in the criticism of the orthodox

opponents of Ram Mohan Roy, a remote transcendentalist, direct against his egalitarian “market-place

theology.” Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Vivekananda, the great spokesman of Neo-Hindu

tolerance and “universalism,” denounces the traditional theory of “adhikarivada as the result of pure

selfishness.”40

For Sen, these different levels of understanding means an avoidance of self-conscious

anthropocentric approach in viewing the nature/man debate. He argues that a strong human commitment

to use resources drives a wedge between personal choice and protection of nature. This assessment

enables comparisons in relative changes between different activities. One information becomes

meaningful for analysis when combined with other information. For example, it is difficult to know how

important the impact is to participants. The participant’s goal is to identify all valued benefits/dis-benefits

by engaging with the chains of practical reasoning.

Second, in the West, the term “moral sense” was first used by the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-

1713), whose writings reflect the optimistic tone both of the school of thought he set up and of so much of

the philosophy of the 18th-century Enlightenment. Joseph Butler (1692-1752), the then Bishop of the

Church of England, developed Shaftesbury’s position in two ways: (a) strengthening the case for a

harmony between morality and enlightened self-interest; (b) recognizing the human consciousness as the

way for later formulations of a universal ethic of conduct that might not be at odds with the path indicated

by even the enlightened self-interested individual reasoning. Almost in the same vein but with a different

philosophy, Indian transcendentalist argues that moral imagination is acceptable only if the imaginative

understanding understands the possible ways of being and acting is moral as the central concern of an

agent. Here, agents are in a position to evaluate many possibilities in terms of good or evil. This

transcendental inclusive model, which represents other views, other competing philosophical views as

being ultimately one’s own, where the idea of a didactic adjustment the different levels qualification can

be used by different points of view. Third, we can train ourselves and regulate our character, but the

levelers we pull are multiplied and strengthened by our being part of a community of mind who will

39

M. Hiriyana, Outlines of Indian Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1932), pp. 56-59. 40

Wilhelm Halbfsss, Tradition and Reflection, pp. 54-57.

11

support us in different ways and means in efforts to behave pro-socially or pro-nature. It is not a matter

of being brain-washed but rather of evaluating and accepting a desirable and possible course of action,

and more importantly, subscribing to a principle, which is an ethical value. We reach a position expressed

by Einstein in a statement to the Spinoza Society in 1893, “human beings, in their thinking, feeling, and

acting are not free but are just as casually bound as the stars in their motion.”

Last, how to logically rescue ethics from generalized moral principles? By claiming that we as

humans are able to construct explicit precepts, we are morally superior to animals, and we can say that a

lion is no more moral or immoral that a tree, but morality is a human construct and so, is not amenable to

explanation in biological terms.i It is no use of arguing that our ethical principles are a mere

rationalization of biological instincts, because rationalization is just as inexplicable in biological terms as

are ethical principles. We need not only a community of minds but also a set of rules for proportional

treatment of man and nature. This process in thinking leads us to the question of foundational ethics.

Methodologically, the rejection of predication in any supposition was accepted by the Cynics, who argue

that there is no foundational belief. Certain qualities lead to virtue ethic, self-rule and freedom from

opinions, others do not. Beyond this, no distinction are to be made. For the Buddhists, there is only one

way, detachment.41

Foundational Ethics and Judgments

Foundationalists respond to the regress problem by claiming that “foundations” of basic beliefs

support other beliefs but do not themselves require justification from other beliefs. These beliefs may be

justified because they are self-evident and infallible, as they drive from reliable cognitive mechanisms.

Perception and memory are possible examples of foundational beliefs. Sen’s primary foundational

transcendental value in conservation is the place of “self” which must be a seeker after value; we judge

value by guiding our behavior by value considerations. Foundationalism in epistemology means that

knowledge must be regarded as a structure raised upon certain secure foundations. Stoics as well as

Descartes found foundationalism as associated with “clear and distinct reason.” Its opponent is

coherentism, which stands for inter-locking strength. Coherence means that arguments must be linear

conclusions that flow directly from state premises.42

Sen challenges the foundationalism idea in

conservation ethics because with the rise of transcendentalism, questions of knowledge seem to have been

marginalized by questions of justification. Apparently, “knowledge” is understood as propositional

knowledge. The rejection of metaphysics, understood in Heidegger’s sense as the attempt to offer grounds

or foundations for our basic practices, discourses and beliefs. Is Sen trying to legitimatize discourse in

Hegel’s dialectic of Spirit or the Enlightenment appeal to reason? Given that people have a set of

preferences about preservation of nature, what rational procedures may be planned to aggregate these

cherished preferences into a single logical social choice preference ordering?

Does Western virtue ethics prove a foundational ethical norm? Classical Western moral

philosophy has the task of legitimizing and grounding our moral beliefs and institutions with the help of

fundamental principles, God as the law-giver, the principle of universalizability and the utility principle.

In contrast, the concept of dharma, like the German Recht, covers a large variety of different phenomena.

Today, both in India and the West, moral theory has broken loose from the constraint of the Kantianism-

Utilitarianism framework. The Indian theory of moral rules, part of the theory of “virtue ethics,” part of

communitarianism, adds a layer of Kantian-like duty for the sake of duty, reaching a transcendent goal

41

See T.W Rhys Davis and Herma Oldenberg, Vinaya Texts, vol. 1 (Sacred Books of the East), pp. 84-85. 42

B.K. Matilal, Perception: An essay on Classical Indian Theories of Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

12

(moksha), leaving aside the domain of religion.43

The goal of moksha can therefore not be wrong if the

decision to commit and act is based on a right motive. Its teleological ethics differ on the nature of the

end that eventual actions ought to promote.44

The Greek happiness virtues hold that ethics consist in

some activity appropriate to man as a human being, and thus tend to emphasize the cultivation of virtue in

the agent as the end of all actin. This teleological virtue ethics, hope and love, can be distinguished from

the Christian ideal of man as a being created in the image of God.45

Johnstone’s Philosophy and Argument begins with the problem of disagreement in foundational

philosophical argument and does not explain his conception of rhetoric and philosophy in its complexity.

He elicits the inner form of thought as a philosophy to describe the problem that originates and drives his

position to see the woods instead of the trees. He argues that philosophers make claims about nature and

the nature of knowledge. These claims must be tested by argument. In argument, philosopher aims at

validity, and the principles of validity are determined in logic. Philosophy is a critical activity. In

Aristotle’s Rhetoric, rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic. Sen develops a critique of rational action

theory, denouncing a too poor sense of intentionality and sociality. Instead he argues that the basic aspect

of consciousness, our target, is indeed perceiver which intentionality, or volition. We experience both

perception and intentionality at our level of organization. Thus Sen promotes a more complex

understanding that integrates values and ethics and raises the question of the motives of action. He does

not completely renounce the rational choice option, rather, seeks to complete it by introducing aspects of

compassion, commitment and multiple preferences as significant elements of choice and action.

If we connect the two themes, nature’s need and man’s sustained demand, then we look for

foundationalism that requires confidence in the rational individual’s capacity to get down to the

foundations. Richard Rorty (Philosophy and Mirror, 1779), presents knowledge as “anti-foundational”

because in the light of “foundationalist” discourse, we can lay claim to having access to the way things

are. Descartes (Meditations) shows that an isolated person secures foundations for the whole edifice of

human knowledge. For Peirce, this inquiry or the search for truth, is a public matter because it ends when

agreement is openly reached. However, Peirce’s argument is not a reason for giving up epistemological

inquiry of the Cartesian type. Descartes’s method of doubt is one way of formulating the task of

epistemology, and in this sense, all formulations of methods are useful.46

Transcendental argument is that

we can understand how something could be found as belief by thinking of it as “knowledge.” Here

propositional evidence is knowledge because knowledge entails belief. This is similar to the

Foundationalism in the Samkhya and Mimamsa Schools that look for the transcendental yearning of

foundational intelligence; the Rig-Veda (chapter 2) epistemology shows less concern with the schemes of

God or gods, and in the Yoga system, Isvara is simply an especially exemplary purusa that is part of

prakiti of human soul. In this mode, Ram Mohan Roy (1772-1833), the founder of Brahmo Samaj (Divine

Society), shapes himself as a cosmopolitan admirer of the European Enlightenment and of Christian

ethics, exhibits an insufficient fidelity to Indian the tradition.

In this discussion, thus, the question of ethics raises another issue: Does an environmental ethic

form part of a foundational relationships between man and nature? What is the contention of ethics that

are continually progressing? Can we claim in accordance with Derek Parfits (Reasons and Persons,

1984) that the consequentialist reasoning in ethics seem to be partial, because as Bruce Ackerman’s

(Ecological Economics) argues, “fairness” implies recognizing global and country level equity

dimensions, particularly in assuring a just transition to an economy that is low- carbon, resource efficient,

43

J.N. Mahanty, Classical Indian Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), p 122. 44

In India, the concept of dharma and moral stand for furnishes the common, semantic ground for the meaningful philosophical disagreement on the subject of ethics. See Shyam Ranganathan, Ethics and the History of Indian Philosophy (Delhi: Matilal Publishers, 2007). 45

“Philosophical Quality of Life and Ethical Dimensions: Philosophical Theories of Quality” in http://medincine.jrank.org/psges/1438/Quality-Life-Philosophical Dimensions,” (accessed on 10/5/2010). 46

Charles Landesman, An Introduction to Epistemology (Oxford, Blackwell, 1997), p. 81

13

and socially inclusive. He is one of the early American thinkers to argue that the industrial revolution has

replaced human workers with machines and has increasingly erased the importance of individuality due to

the uniform machines and production. When these contentions are de-constructed, we are usually faced

with the ill-defined world and words, emergent from it. Heidegger opts for a new relation to language

altogether, one that results from a “meditative openness” to the world. The world speaks through us when

we disregard the metaphysical voice.47

The question is whether the experimental dimension can be

explored adequately by means of Husserl’s “reflective methodology,” which means both descriptive and

reflective modes.48

Husserl’s interpretation of “empathy” is questioned by some who argue that Husserl

empathetic-communicative process may not objective.49

As Heidegger points out, life-experience is

imbued with meaning and is intentionally structured and has an inner articulation and rationality; it is self-

understanding. He rejects the idea that experimental life should be mute, instead, life-experience is

imbued with meaning.50

In other words, transcendental words, phenomenology must build on familiarity

that life has with itself. It has two aspects – intentionality and inter-subjectivity. The intuitive idea is that

the qualifying feature is a concept, empirically acquired by the perceiver and used to categorize the object

perceived. It is beyond Kant’s critical method, because the picture of inference first, explanation second,

seriously underestimate the role of explanatory considerations of reasoning.

For Sen, this discussion is mostly about evidence of probability. If we assume that prior

probabilities (in foundational ethics) should align themselves with expected probabilities posterior to the

future acquisition of knowledge (good conservation principle), we assign the probability of being known

in the future of a privileged status in the present moment. Why should we give the property of being

known by us tomorrow a privileged status? We give preference because it is truth-telling property. No

doubt, we cannot take advantage of new transcendence knowledge in advance, but we must cross that

bridge when we come to it, and accept the consequences of our epistemic judgment. If the concept

“knows” is vague, likewise the concept “justified” is also vague. As Harman (1965) and Lipton (1991)

argue in reference to the best explanation, we often choose between hypotheses by asking which of them

explains our evidence.51

Interestingly, Sen never completely ignores the rational framework in the basic question of ethics,

as he does not commit himself to “a weak sense of rationality.”52

In terms of human intervention in

sustainability of nature, Sen expresses his moral philosophy that draws not from Adam Smith’s moral

philosophy, but from Kant’s, which suggests respect for the identifiable dignity of natural objects,

animals and trees, and derivatively, respect for moral values.

Justification of Foundational Ethics: Principles in Conservation

Transcendentalists argue that the cosmos is itself a commonwealth and to run from it is to be an

alien in the universe, an exile. This needs justification. E = K suggest a very modest type of

foundationalism on which all one’s knowledge serves as the foundation for all one’s justified beliefs.

47

M. Heidegger develops the idea that phenomenology is the name of a philosophical approach specifically interested in consciousness; it is more than psychological self-observation. See Dan Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), pp. 5-6. 48

E. Husserl, Shorter Works, edited by P. McCormick and F.A. Allison (Notre Dame, IA: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). 49

Kevin Hermberg, “Empathy and Knowledge: Husserl’s Introductions to Phenomenology” (January 1, 2003), http://epublications.marqutntte.edu.dissertations 50

Cited in Dan Zahavi, Subjectivity, pp. 5-7; 76-85.Interestingly, unlike Peirce, Russell argues that one structure is accurate representation of another if there is one-one correlation between the terms, as well between the relations of the two structures. See Bertrand Russell, “Vagueness,” Australian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 1 (1923); C. S. Peirce, “Vague,” Dictionary of Philosophy, edited by J.M. Baldwin, London, 1902). 51

T. Williamson, Knowledge and its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), and its Limits, pp.186, 194. 52

Sen, On Ethics and Economics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), p. 104.

14

Perhaps, we can understand how something could found belief only thinking of it as “knowledge.” Sen’s

paradigm of justice is centered round concrete concepts of freedom seems to be emerging, because

relations between paradigms are not clear.53

Quine’s assertion that epistemology, being the most viable

branch of philosophy, which deals with nature and humans, runs into self-contradiction.54

In Husserl’s

analysis, perception is presentational; imagination is re-presentational. In this sense, the object is said to

be mentally represented, rather than perceptually presented. In Husserl’s formulation the present memory

does not really contain the past experience, but instead contains it only intentionally and in this sense

“intentionality implicates it.”55

Yet, like animals, human beings are surrounded by living and non-living

material objects, but unlike other animals their world is world of concrete facts and facts are not lumps of

matter. Mind, as the evolutionary theorist, J.B. Haldane maintains, is not a mere by-product of matter.

The subordination of ethics to neuro-science (experimental philosophy”) is self-loathing in philosophy. It

is erroneous to conclude that philosophy should investigates ethical issues by scanning the brains of

people. Quine fails to see un-natural nature of knowledge. As the Princeton philosopher Gilbert Harman

stipulates, moral philosophy will never grow unless it matures into social psychology. It is time for

philosophy to reassume its basic duty: to look critically at the conceptual framework within which

transcendence ethical thoughts operates.

Critically arguing implies, as revealed by the Samkhya and Mimamsa Schools, the transcendental

but intellectual yearning that contends that the issue of universalizing consideration of environmental

ethics belongs to epistemology. As the attention space was divided between Buddhist and Hindu schools,

the former staked its stance ever more sharply on the destruction of any realist position, including weak

ones encompassing both universals and particulars. Accounts of these “human capabilities” (Sen’s words)

for argumentation differ among philosophers and environmental justice scholars as they work under

different concepts dealing the environmental ethics, but for Sen, they have become human capacities for

an appropriation of morals that call for the need for an appropriate social and philosophical environment

that may provide a common platform for preservation of man and nature.

In Greece, issues of ethics coming to the fore only after the intellectual community acquired an

internal density and hence a push to higher levels of abstract self-reflection. From the central conception

of typos (smoke vs. mist), the Cynics developed an ethic which is like that of Buddhist schools based on

the Madhyamika, arguing that one way of deciding on an ethical action is to find out whether it leads to

viraga, detachment or attachment.56

In their eschatological aspect, Indian theorists consider the effects

supposedly especially of spiritual actions, some of these effects flowing into the after-life via karma duty

ethics. The philosophers of the Nyaya School hold that the knowledge that brings about the desire, and

then the will to do, is knowledge by the “agent-to-be” that the desired goal is achievable and that

performance of the action will bring about some good to the agent, this good being acquiring sukha or

happiness, and getting rid of duhka or pain. No attempt should be made to ground the theory in

metaphysics. The only legitimation that is offered is epistemological, which argues that there is a moral

imperative for an agent to inform himself as much as possible about a situation before judging the

appropriate curse of actin. Of course, this imperative is derived from consequential thinking, because a

better-informed agent is able to bring about better consequences.

For Sen, conservation ethics must be for practical needs. Practical necessity is one element that

goes into the idea of moral obligation. What Kant’s categorical imperative does not mean that “I must,”

but is construed as unconditional practical necessity as being peculiar to morality. It means whatever we

must want must be a kind of necessity, and it is only moral reasons that could transcend desire in that

way. His picture of imperative necessity is free from causality, as a demand of moral inner law, which

53

Timothy Williamson, Knowledge and Its Limits, pp. 221-228. 54

W.V.O., Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized,” in his Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969). 55

Mark Siderits et al (eds.) Self, No Self? (Oxford University Press2011), chapter five. 56

Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies (New York: Allworth Press, 2002), pp. 439, 534, 595.

15

according to Ricour, does not exhaust the question concerning the identity of the self. Hindu noumenal

Hindu scripts depict the sense of reflective reality, which says that nature speaks through us when we let

go of the metaphysical voice. It reminds us of the spirit of Alasdair McIntyre’s insistence on the central

importance of narrative to ethical thought, which is a rejection of modernist ethical thought.57

However, if

a “holistic ethic is really to incorporate the whole story, it “must systematically embed itself in historical

eventfulness,” otherwise, it may not be objective.

Within the context of societies dominated by possessive individualism, these concerned

practical dilemmas can be resolved with some success by reconciling the interests of humans with those

of environment.58 An influential “theory and method” for the analytical philosophy has been developed

by Quentine Skinner’s core idea that argues that we understand a philosophy to the extent that we can

fill in the context in which the philosophy is written with adequate derail, using an “illocutionary

intervention” by the contextual texts. The inadequacy in Skinner “context” is explained by the Indian

“new reason” philosophy of Raghunatha and others, which argues that context should include various

contexts – social, political, intellectual, and inter-textual. In the past, in Europe, the power of intellectual

intervention used to stay with the Aristotelians in the university departments, whereas in India, it was

located with religious and secular public figures. Indian thinkers have been able to draw upon the deep

intellectual resources when confronted with the profoundest rupture of all, the British colonization.

Some of these same resources were to enable it not only to survive but also to emerge in people like

Gandhi, Tagore, Matilal,59 and now Amartya Sen.

Environmental ethic requires public justification under indeterminacy. The Kantian procedure (in

law-making) faces a dilemma. If we follow Kant totally excluding which sets us apart as mere in private

ends irrelevant to moral legislation, we may get a shared result, but only because we have ignored basic

evaluative diversity. John Rawls avoids the indeterminacy by introducing powerful philosophical devices

– maximum reasoning. Sen’s “Buridan ass” – the donkey who was precisely midway between two

haystacks and could not decide whether to turn right, X, to eat from one or left, and ended up dying of

starvation (Z). The less interesting but more common, interpretation is that the ass was indifferent

between two haystacks, and could not find any reason to choose one haystack over the other, Sen

argues. Given this, standard utility theory cannot show that there is a rational choice to be made from

the set. In short, deep moral disagreement is the inevitable result of deep evaluative pluralism in any

deliberative model.60

Inferences and Ethical Judgments

Inference is a process of moving from provisional acceptance of a proposition to acceptance of

some proposition, to acceptance of others. Sen proposes a theory that recognizes the importance of certain

inferences, but these inferences are not absolute. While consequentialism focuses on promoting some

kind of good consequences, teleological ethics (telos end and logos is science Greek rationality) advocate

a plurality of ends, including the attainment of virtue ethic. Sen’s objective is to analytically evaluate the

conceptualization and is possible, implementation of philosophically integrated conservation and

development of practical program. His focus is on the philosophical interventions into such matters as

57

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IA: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 216. 58

Julie Davidson, “Sustainable Development,” Environmental Ethics, vol. 22, pp. 26-27. 59

J. Ganeri, The Lost Age of Reason, p. 15. 60

Isaac Levi, “Hard Choices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 84; Sen, Collective Choice and Social Welfare, p. 3; Sen, “Maximization and the Act of Choice,” p. 184; Gerald Gaus, The Order of Public Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp.306-310.

16

tree-hugging or oil-rig management. His conceptualization may lead to programs attempting to integrate

conservation with economic well-being. For Sen, this is “development as freedom.” But he hastens to

insist that institutional ethics for facilitating collective capabilities are as important as to the expansion of

free will as sustaining the philosophical foundation for those interested in pursuing emotional

environmental sustainability. Going back to Emperor Asoka and diplomat-cum-economist Kautilya, Sen

argues that Indian philosophical attitude to nature has taken care of emotional and spiritual norms that

have been based on logic and rationality. It is a debate about deontology versus consequentialism in

interpretation. In essence, Sen expands the scope human capabilities to evaluate the environmental issues.

The pluralist ethicists include some, if not all, personal goods as fundamental ethical values, alongside

wellbeing and welfare, the immediate concern for the entire human race as well as tress, animals, and

water.

Because human actions may be unreasonable, we need to get into the moral issues that

demonstrate the means to moral rules. The natural law, as elaborated by Locke, argues that in the original

community governed by “natural law” which stipulated that the land could be appropriated provided

others would have the opportunity to get their future shares, on the assumption that property right did not

accrue merely by virtue of labor. Locke makes it clear that a community had a partial right and equally

nature must not be exploited to the “fullest human interests.” Locke does not present his case in

philosophical terms, and it does not require us to follow end-state principles, such as equality and need.

Rather, it requires that land not to be concentrated in the hands of few owners so that this concentration

itself limits procedural or environmental justice (voluntariness of actions). For clarity, Nozik argues that

the argument does not rely on any end-state principle. His argument is that the focus is on a particular

way that appropriate actions affect others, and not on the structure of the situation that results.61

The aim

of Locke and Nozik is not to convey truth about Locke’s world of nature, but to free us from German

National Socialism’s pathological fixation and to provide a curative therapy for the diseases in languages,

used by contending groups. For Sen, environmental ethics with its moral philosophy involves

systematizing, defending, and recommending both concepts and norms of right and wrong behavior

toward equitable protection of nature and humans. Sen’s emphasis is on duty ethics (Greek word, deon,

duty) that had many duties, as spelled out by the 17th-centry German philosopher Samuel Oufedorf.

Kant’s “categorical imperative” is different from hypothetical imperatives, hinging on some personal

desire. In contrast, Sen relies on consequentialism that tells us we evaluate our good and bad

consequences of our action toward the environment, and he accepts alternative notion of rights, such as

positive rights, collective rights, or animal rights, and this alternative position demands a definition of

harm. In short, Sen’s foundational theory of knowing moral truths differ from coherence theory of truth,

which relies on coherence but provides no clues if a foundational stance can be taken in terms of truth.

Interestingly, the analysis of a cognition is not an analysis of the object in the ontological mode,

but rather of the content in an epistemological vein. First, mechanistic concept and analysis fail to answer

the question what guides the mechanism. It is not possible to explain the emergence of higher stages from

lower one – of animal life from mere matter, or mind from merely animal. Mind and spirit must, argues

Aurbindo, are things which universal structure has hidden in herself” before their manifest emergence.

Second, it would be erroneous t think that evolution ends with emergence of human-consciousness. In

that sense, Skinner’s context misses the point that “logical knowledge” can at best give the structure of

being and not being itself. In short, just as Kant’s transcendental idealism is a philosophical interpretation

of ordinary experience, and a not a criticism of it, so the Advaita doctrine of Brahman is no rejection of

but an interpretation of concrete faith.

61

Robert Nozik, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).

17

In short, as John Searle argues, there is no obstruction to our studying subjective, first-person

facts, with “objectivity.” If we do not already accept well-being as a value, then there seems to be

argument for why we should promote well-being. Poetic imagination calls for cognitive judgment. Indian

inter-subjectivity as presented by poets/philosophers represents the relationship between self and the

other, ego and alter ego, individual and community. Edmund Husserl makes the constitution of inter-

subjectivity its goal in the Cartesian Meditations (1929). He means to say that “we” is a component of the

“I.” 62

Sen’s Proportionality in Ethics

Time, space, and the causal series are the work of the intuitive stage of knowledge as opposed to

the work of the intuitive stage of knowledge as opposed to the conceptual one. But it is the pure relation-

less intuition of reality, which may be termed intellectual intuition but the intuition that imposes its forms

on the real substrate or in other words empirical intuition.63

Proportionality is the propositional calculus. Sen argues that environmental ethics may well be

assessed by both cognitive reasoning and affective imagination, both arguing why agents realize a

particular one among many possibilities. The Greek verb in a sentence cognates with Latin video,

meaning “know by seeing;” in other words, “even if someone should succeed in telling the truth, if he is

not speaking from direct personal experience but from conjecture, then his statement is invalid

methodologically, regardless of its correspondence or lack of correspondence with the facts.”64

Kalidas’s

emotional attachment to Nature’s purity, is an ecological perception which is “perceiving the environment

we,” in the words of Gibson, “co-perceive ourselves.” As Gibson insists, it has two principal aspects: (a)

the optic flow provides information about the movement and spacial position of the perceiver; and (b)

“we perceive objects as affording actions.” In perceiving affordance, we perceive ecological objects

relative to our own dimensions, abilities and perhaps inclinations.

Nevertheless, a reflective perceiving deserves a match between intention and movement, as a

transcendentalist Tagore would claim, and requires a prior indexical awareness that can simultaneously

play a practical role as well as an epistemological role, but as Brooks argues, we over-value our cognitive

analytical rationality and “autonomous will” (Sen’s view) as the motors of success, and unduly under-

value “emotion” and intuition, thereby giving rise to infamous “confirmation bias.”65

Thus, Adam Smith

(The Theory of Moral Sentiment, 1759), confirms that our idea of the notion of “perception” is a kind of

movie motion playing inside our heads in the so-called Cartesian theater. Bernard Williams examines the

Humean theory of motivational action, which makes it clear that there are two elements in Hume’s theory

of understanding. First, every action should be justified through reference to some desires, which for Sen

becomes “preferences,” suggesting that belief alone is not enough. Second, the argument that purports

this conclusion is called “the teleological argument.”66

Sen claims that the teleological argument is

derived from Aristotle, who argues that the good for man cannot be whimsically stopped in the name of

efficient reasoning only. However, the Aristotelian line of thought emphasize information from the five

62

Cited in Louis Agosta, Empathy and Inter-subjectivity,” in Joseph Lichtenberg et all (eds.), Empathy 1 (London: The Analytic Press, 1984), pp. 44-45. 63

Sir Brajendranath Seal, The Positive Sciences of the Ancient Hindus (Memphis, TN: General Books LLC, 2012), pp.4-7. 64

Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought, pp. 328-329. 65

David Brooks, The Social Animal (New York: Random House, 2011), p. 424. 66

Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

18

physical senses and the external experience. Lao Tse, Gautama Buddha, Zoroaster, Plato and the Gnostic

Greeks emphasize internal experience.67

Thus, the general welfare economics does homogenize the universe of heterogeneous goods and

does not differentiate the universe of the homogenous human species.ii In his essay, “Rational Fool”

(1977), Sen argues that the purely economic man is close to being a social motion, and that a person, who

has no use for distinctions between his positive and normative choices and interest and welfare must be a

bit of a fool. The preference ordering of orthodox economics is a serious abstraction from the real world

as well as from distinctions of basic significance. Thus, Sen observes that when advantage is equated with

utility, efficiency coincides with Pareto optimality, but insofar the notion of advantage is changed, so the

content of efficiency and equality. Sen disagrees on what constitutes “the good for man.” A superior

maxim, involving a reasoned investigation into a generic teleology for a specie versus sui generis

individualist conception of the main issue is the human reason that is capable of deliberate judgment

about “generic” human needs, and not Sen’s endorsement of culturally dependent values favored by

individual critical evaluation. Timothy Williamson (Knowledge and its Limits) argues that the concept of

knowledge cannot be analyzed into a set other concepts; instead, it is sui generis. Thus, though

knowledge requires justification, truth, the word “knowledge” cannot be, Williamson argues, accurately

regarded as simply shorthand for justified true belief. However, given a choice between Hume’s account

of the “passions” and Sen’s kind of intellectualism, it is certain that people would be inclined to accept

the passions, affective and touching, as the best candidate for unmoved mover.

These proportionality rules have two components: first, ethical rules should have broader

“affective values” beyond cognitive revelations, and second, they serve the interests of the widest possible

human and nature’s needs, and not merely equalization of justice among humans. The exploratory

function of ethical imagination is forward looking because it concerns the question of which our available

possibilities we should attempt to realize now and in the future. The Stoic describe affective passion in the

form of naturalistic philosophy. Their account of the process which leads from sensation to action, is like

Epicurus’s, based mainly on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, but like Epicurus’s version, with avenues

opened up toward revision of the hexis, our disposition. This disposition amounts to Buddhist “sensation,”

coming from rom contact of an object with a sense organ. For the Stoics, then, actions rise from a

psychological process which may be automatic, the arising of impulsive actions, which in fact contains a

more or less concealed element of Sen’s “free will,” a kind of hexis.68

Again, some of the affective

virtues, forming disposition, can be formulated, in Indian tradition, as rules of action. Thus, to a charity

corresponds to the rule “un-conditionality” as given to the needy.” Some virtues are not actional, but are

modes of the inner being, transcendence. These are both compassion and detachment. Sattva-

valambanakaruna or compassion that depends upon the truth of taps suffering of all species. Compassion

is inseparable from emptiness (sunyatta), as sunyata compassion is also “transcendent” (lokottara),

beyond the worldly values. What is usually called the ethical is only a part that is mingled with cognitive

and affective stages of human “capabilities.”69

Sen conforms to Parson’s reasoning that advocates the institutionalization of a norm, which is

rule-following consideration more generally, which may be accommodated simply by positing an

intentional state associated directly with actions. Norm, Sen insists, cannot be simply be subsumed into

the agent’s outcome-based utility function, but that they represent sui generis constraints on the actions

chosen. He develops a system or representation for a general utility function based on norms. However,

67

“A Dyadic Model of Consciousness,” Institute of Noetic Sciences, CA (Sept 19, 1995). 68

Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought, pp. 622-623. 69

J.N. Mahanty, Classical Indian Philosophy, p. 114.

19

people follow the rules because they want to follow the rules, without attaching too much values. In order

to produce a truly general theory of action, one has to introduce norms into the utility function in a way

that is completely vacuous with respect to the content of these norms, a kind of Sen’s “preference.”

Herbert Gintis calls this as belief, preference as well as constraint.70

To overcome constraints one needs to

use affective action. In this sense, moral philosophy has been dominated by attempts to impose

axiomatization on morality, delivering a maximally parsimonious set of moral rules from which all other

more concrete obligations could be derived. This kind of syllogism in the form of logic from the time of

Aristotle to Mill has been used as inductive. The widespread presence of the Hellenistic schools

throughout the eastern Roman Empire makes this inductive variant more likely to have turned up in India

than Aristotle’s. There were Epicurean teachers active in Afghanistan and north-western India. Epicurean

logicians stripped Aristotelian logic of its universals and re-shaped it into an empiricist form. Like the

Indian Naiyayika logic, the Epicurean form is based on particular-to-particular reasoning employing both

induction and analogy. It does not accept the legitimacy of the universal proposition and is not involved

in a quasi-metaphysical belief in abstract logical necessity.71

Feasibility of Generalized Moral Rules

Thinkers emphasize the need to balance interests of various receivers. Conservation effort has to

be more sensitive to the dangers of extrapolations about agricultural system on the basis of very precise

but isolated evidence, and thus, it is no longer necessary for environmental ethicists to castigate the

abstract theme as too much grand theory and not enough social context. Sen’s argument is that Utilitarian

theorists must answer the charge that ends do not justify the means. Commenting on harm to species and

human beings, Henry Shue also argues that corporations and business houses are morally bound to create

transfer of harmful technologies because, among others, developing countries alone cannot be expected to

impose strict technological and environmental standards because countries have to compete with other

countries for foreign investments. A second idea is that no institution has the moral rights to inflict harm

in the name of well-being. Although Shue’s second argument is acceptable, no one should cause harm to

nature or human beings so as to hold down the production costs, a critical question is how to define

“infliction of harm.” At what stage inflicting a higher “probability” of damages, immediate or remote,

constitute harm. One of the chief argument of Henry Shue is that a governmental regulation is not a must

because if forced on corporations, they can themselves can regulate harm.72

Certainly, corporation

themselves cannot police themselves as Sen’s example of Alaska’s oil spill suggests. On the other hand,

the general public derive “responsibility through ability,” but do the citizens have the realistic ability to

make an effective position? As has been exemplified by the India’s worst industrial disaster in Bhopal in

central India in 1984, citizens have only an implied social contract, and no effective strength.

Generalized moral Justice can be evaluated from three ethical dimensions. First, hedonic theories

mean an act of self-interpretation in which happiness or pleasure are unmediated sensation. Second,

rational preference theories define desires in terms of actual satisfaction. They mean that a good life

affirms an objective state of the world which conforms to what people rationally desire. Third, theories

of human flourishing imply a capacity that provide people with various types of resources, material as

well as spiritual. This capacity, as Sen stipulates, means a plan of self-fulfillment. Sen argues that human

beings are not necessarily seated at the top of the ethical hierarchy because the ethical calculation requires

70

Joseph Heath, Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 72-73. 71

Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Philosophy, pp. 511-513 72

Henry Shue, “Exporting Hazards,” in Boundaries (ed.).P Brown and Henry Shue (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1981), pp. 107-108.

20

a value system that calls for a human efforts for sustainability of nature in a proportional balancing vein.iii

He makes a strong statement by reaffirming that we, the humans, are responsible for disturbing the

nature’s “state of nature” by acting against “forest,” the “depth of ground of the ground water table,” and

causing the decline of “living creatures.” He concludes that we add to “impurities and pollutants” by our

deliberate misdeeds causing to harm not only to the “state of nature” but also ourselves. “We must not,

therefore think of the environment in terms of exclusively” conserving the “pre-existing natural

conditions,” it is misuse of our “capability.”73

Proportional allocational justice refers to the morally proper apportionment of benefits and

burdens, such as toxic waste dumps, dirty air, etc. among members of the public. John Rawls and other

theorists of ethical values argue that by distributive justice we, humans, can provide a standard by means

of which our society can assess the distributive aspects for preservation of the basic structure. Bruce

Ackerman interprets this as our proportionate initial entitlements of a scarce resource, which is

convertible into social good. Norton presents this deliberate attempt in terms of a policy converge

between eco-centric and anthropocentric perspectives for bi-diversity that may provide a good example of

value eclecticism, maintain a balance between nature and society.74

In all these instances, there is a

demand for equitable distribution of social justice as well as environmental justice.

There is nothing new in all these ideas because the analysts and moral theorists merely restate of

what has been said by generations of ethicists. Some, of course, would go further by pleasing for

proactive human action. For instance, The African Initiated Christian Church in Zimbabwe offers a

program to “cloth the earth” with new trees to cover human-induced nakedness. Its “new green program”

ushers an ecological program for action to integrate a conservation ethic with the heartbeat of church

praxis, the practical application of a theory with a devotional spirit. Religious beliefs becomes the

environmental ethics, and act as a tool for conservation as well as human rights.

Mind and Cosmos

In Greek kosmos (order) the whole world is conceived in terms of destiny and justice. Thomas

Nagel (Mind and Cosmos) is one of the pioneers who argue there is a world beyond the empirical and

material world. His chief argument is that in order to achieve a fairly comprehensive understanding of the

world we need to recognize the world beyond, i.e. - the transcendental world. It fits with the idea, as

Kapogiannis puts it, of an “adaptive cognitive function.” It means, in Kant’s words (Critique of Practical

Reason), knowledge can be subject to intuitive understanding of man, not to be understood by reason. It

is hard-wired into the brain because it is of evolutionary benefit. The communal and spiritual sense

conferred by transcendentalism, we are told, have given groups of hunter-gathers a more developed

feeling of togetherness. Hood argues that the evolutionary adaptation is the expression of the way our

minds are structured.75

This argues that economics ultimately evolved from “Nature,” in particular the

exchange of goods and services which are ultimately derived from Nature. On the other hand, the modern

economic theory has become detached from “Nature” and has largely caused the destruction of Nature.

Only with correct transcendental foundations we are able to appreciate how ultimately interconnected we,

humans, are intimately connected with Nature, and our survival depends on a balancing act. The high

level of consumption that is directly connected to the overuse of the resources of the planet and the

terrible waste problems that caused global warming, ozone depletion and our current destruction of

habitat. All of these mismanagement of nature generated huge physical problems that are bringing us to

the brink of evolutionary breakdown. In an urban setting, we live in a human-created environment,

73

Sen, The Idea of Justice, p. 269, Sen, “Rational Fools,” pp. 317-344. 74

See Joseph Heath, Following the Rules (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), ch. 8. 75

Tallis, Aping Man, pp. 323-324.

21

surrounded by other people plus a few domesticated plants and animals, as well as pests that have

overcome our defenses. We are biological beings, as dependent on the biosphere as any other life form

and we forget our animal nature at our peril. Modern definition of truth, such as those as pragmatism and

instrumentalism, which are practical rather than contemplative, are inspired by industrialization as

opposed to aristocracy.

Some sociologists go so far as to suggest that the environmental justice may not be linked to

human well-beings. A prominent environmentalist argue that nature may not be equal force in the matter

of equation. Obviously, such marginalization of nature has been a fashion through the industrial progress

of humanity. Politically, as Attfield argues, an environmental ethic has become an ideological tool for

solidarity. However, Sen has a different approach to conservation. In his essay about “environmental

evaluation” in the Japanese Economic Review (1995), and also in his conversation with Bina Agarwal,

Sen recommends that we, human beings concerned with conservation, should pay due attention to

Gautama Buddha’s Sutta Nipata, requiring that human beings, being more powerful than nature, must pay

adequate attention to preservation of the status quo, if not an enhancement of “the quality of human lives

in order to balance the “asymmetry of power.”76

In Sutta Nipata, there is hardly race of formal dialectical argumentation, but it attempts to turn

attention from inherited lore about reality to the direct evidence of experience as human agency. This

principle accords well with the Burndland Report (1987) that with a much broader development model

states that “human being as agents” for development should have some balanced freedom of action. The

Report argues that the total stock of assets, man-made roads and nature-given minerals and water, may

not remain constant, and as such, characterizes sustainable development as “development as :development

that meets the needs of the current generation,” and must not “compromise the ability of future

generations to meet their own needs.”

Critical to Sen’s debate about the balancing act is the idea of choice, or a moral option. Too much

choice as desire in justice, ague Sheena Ayengar of Columbia University and Mark Lepper, of Stanford

University, “is demotivating.” In Gita, the right is to only the action. Morally, its interest is not in the

causes of human conduct, but in its signification, its objective, its aim is not to form legal formulation, but

to concentrate on the reciprocal interaction between particular actions and their ethical contexts. It does

not say how we act that is descriptive but to evaluate a possible moral code that takes of environment and

human well-being. The dialogue between cognitive science and spiritual ideas is empirical. Edmund

Gettier (1963) challenges the traditional definition of knowledge as justified true belief, and now there is

widespread agreement among philosophers that traditional definition is incorrect or at least incomplete.

Yet, nobody seems to agree on what the correct definition of knowledge is. In conclusion, our existing

moral value concept lacks a definitional structure. As the philosopher Patricia Churchland puts it, “no one

has the slightest idea how to compare the mild headache of five million against the broken legs of two.”77

Trees or Human Jobs? Intentionality and Conflicting Interests

The psychologist Paul Slovic uncovers some rather startling limitations on our capacity for moral

reasoning when thinking about large groups of people, or, indeed, about groups larger than one. However,

76

Daisetz Suzuki, “The Basis of Buddhist Philosophy,” in D.T. Suzuki on Indian Mahayana Buddhism, ed. Edward Gonze (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), pp. 227-250. 77

P. M. Churchland, The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 19950, p. 72.

22

one of the great tasks of civilization is to create cultural mechanisms that protect us from the moment-to-

moment failures of our ethical intuitions. Here, science of morality could be indispensable to us.78

For Sen, the environmental ethic faces dilemmas not only between competing human interests,

but also between contrasting morals that deal with practical human interest and the sustainability of

Nature. For instance, a resource allocation idea has been applied to the “Kasar Region” in Northern

Nigeria where the lack of a tax on owners of firewood and the fuel wood production was supposed to

reduce pressure on the poor to exploit vegetation resources. The regional Muslim Sultan exempted the

poor village firewood tree-owners from any taxation apparently to preserve nature and help the poor to

have their rights in subsistence livelihood, although in reality the liberal taxation policy might have

helped the Sultan to maintain his tradition apolitical authority and social control. Sen’s environmental

entitlement notion has been incorporated by several international organizations,79

which have developed

a subsidiary concept in the rural “livelihood concept” with rural thinking in which villagers may resort to

risks as well as safety measures in the management of natural resources.80

Attfield advocates an

environmental ethics that need to be confined to what has already happened, but what could produce

reasoned accounts of goals that should be global as well as for humans and wild life in the future. This

futuristic vision is projected by Sen as he argues in a novel way that a moral environmental policy should

encourage female education and gainful employment that could eventually help reduce fertility rates.

Interesting, he adds, this policy could reduce the pressure on global warming and “the increasing

destruction of natural habitats.” Likewise, he insists that formal school education on Indian environmental

ethics in a spiritual mode could make students of more conscious for conservation. This is what Petit calls

goal-modifying commitment integrating commitment into the theory of rational choice. Norms on this

view can be understood as reasons to change one’s preferences.

In Sen’s thesis, then, there is an apparent conflict between human perception and Sen’s “agency.”

This dual commitment is intimately connected to the role of beliefs as reasons for beliefs and action.

When Sen argues that a well-educated informed school student has increased his power of perception, the

person, now educated, has indeed necessarily acted intentionally. Sen’s speculation on the differences

between pointing and grasping require further explorations of the relations between two behaviors. In

other words, are some human actions toward preservation of natural resources necessarily intentional?

Sen’s argues that gainful employment of women can reduce fertility rates, reducing the pressure on global

warming and increased destruction of animals and forests. His argument is that agency power does not

depend on a single, indivisible process. Instead they are distinct ways in which different forms of

intentions are implemented. As if, the implementation of different intentions take place through separable

neural systems.

In contrast, pitted against the modernist view of pragmatic intentionality, which Sen calls the

"fierce" or "hard knocks" approach, has been an equally uncompromising critique voiced by grassroots

activists and nongovernmental organizations around the world. Sen views this in the “Chipko movement”

in the Himalayan foothills, where peasants symbolically hugged trees to stop the logging that was

destroying their traditional forest-based economy. It has parallel in the Zapatista movement, in the

impoverished Chiapas region of Mexico, whose enigmatic leader, Subcomandante Marcos, railed against

78

Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (New York: Free Press2010), pp.71-71. 79

Sacred Ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Resource Management (Philadelphia, PA: Taylor and Francis, 1900, p. 158. 80

“Resource Management,” www.livelihood.org (accessed 10/34/2010).

23

globalization as a "hemorrhage that fattens the powerful."81

For Sen’s environmental statement is another

aspect of “Orientalism” without the usual romanticizing and self-enhancing tendency that has led to the

repeated binary of the “Spiritual East” versus “Rational West,” meaning one is superior to the other.

Romantic orientalists, like the German idealists, projects the East as a fantastic “other,” an unknown alien

inviting outsiders to the exotic East. As Romantics exorcized the East, they projected “the hope that the

ills of Western society can be assuaged by the supposedly more spiritual, primal wisdom of Asia.”82

It takes more than one set of opaque lenses, of preconceived ideas, to prevent us from seeing what

is in front of us. Some people believe that a chimp reaching for a banana and shopper reaching out for a

can of beans are doing the same kind of things. Thomas Huxley argues that no one would deny that in his

bodily frame, man bears “the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.” Likewise, none would deny that

humans are anatomically closer to chimps than the latter are, for example, a dwarf lemur or centipede. Of

course, this does not deny the potential differences between the great apes and humans. We narrow the

gap between humans and beasts describing animal behavior anthropologically, making it seem to be

human-like; talking down humans is complemented by talking up animals. There is a gap between

humans and chimps.83

Two lessons are leaned here. First, environmental policy should take into

consideration that demands close similarities between policies for different species. Second, humans have

special needs, but they must identify the demands of nature. In this context, the concept of environmental

pluralism means the fragmentation of hitherto unified traditions and of the coherent beliefs and values

that have derived from them. Its sources are manifold, and include social diversification and

disintegration, the rise of ethical consciousness among different nations and localities, and philosophical

skepticism about the universality of knowledge about environment. Moreover, trade and conquest over

the past three centuries clearly opened up the mind and sympathies to viable world views at variance with

one another. Now there is a “countervailing tendency” in the history of orientalism where plurality has

been seen as a station on the way toward a loftier unity in human intentionality.

In Indian philosophy, intentional is purposive and goal-directed. It is cognitive acts, or cognitive

experiences in the sense that thy have an “object” of their own, i.e. savisayka, although they may not

appears as intentional in the first instance. In the technical vocabulary of the Nyaya-Vaiseika, those

cognitive acts are not karmas, but guna (virtue as element) of a soul. A cognitive act is caused by

appropriate causal conditions, just as the cognitive act itself gives rise to appropriate volitional acts,

thereby making no distinction between the causal and the intentional, which dominates Western thinking

in intentionality. In standard Western theory, the Sinn refuses to be integrated into the overall causa

nexus. The samkalapa (intentionality), however, is just a first sign of the sharpening of the mind because

something else has to be revealed. Citta (awareness) is more than intention. Another important threshold

which Western translators fail to observe. Senart translates citta as “raison” or reason, Olivelle as

“thought.’ And yet, citta is neither reason, nor thought. Citta is used for the act of becoming aware. The

grandiose Vedic perspective, being cosmic rather than psychological, opens up: “The earth, in a certain

way (iva), mediates; the waters, in a certain way, mediate; gods and men, in certain way, mediate;

therefore, those among men who reach greatness are, in a certain way, partaking of meditation.”

However, beyond mediation, vijnana (discernment) is more than meditation, a word that would have an

important connotation in Buddhist ideology of knowledge. The discernment of spirits would be practiced

by Ignatius of Loyola. The general rule finds a ritual counterpart: nothing exists in itself, all is the result

of intention and actual work. Likewise, soma plant from the heavens does not exist until it is pressed;

81

Akas Kapur, Sen’s Development as Freedom in “A Third Way for the Third World” (December 1999). 82

Brooke Schedneck, “The Decontextualization of Asian Religious Practices in the Context of Globalization,” JCRT, vol. 12, no. 3 (Spring 2013), pp. 3-36. 83

Tallis, Aping Mankind, p.330.

24

filtered, and sprinkled y the sacrifice. The existence of the soma brings about transformation in the person

who with his actions has brought into being.

Is intentional self-conscious? Any given now-phase of consciousness retains the just-phases of its

intestinal object only by retaining the just-past phases of its intentional object only by retaining the just-

phases of its consciousness of the object. Thus, not only is consciousness aware of itself in retention, but

it must be retentionally self-aware in order to be aware of objects across time. This retentional self-aware

is not a form of transitive consciousness, object-directed intentionality; indeed, it is an intransitivity

reflexivity, a passive self-relatedness. More precisely as Zahavi argues, internal time-consciousness as

flowing in time; it is basically the pre-reflective self-awareness of the stream of consciousness. Human

acting by definition is state of any kind because it is dynamic, not static. While knowing that the door is

shut may be a mental action. Similar asymmetries come up if we pursue more restricted analogy between

action and perception, for example, between breaking the window and seeing that window is broken. One

starts seeing that the window is broken after light rays reach one’s retina; we cannot make an apparently

symmetric claim that finishes breaking the window before the stone leaves one’s hand.

Why do we differentiate the input and output sides so differently? The answer may lie in our

tendency to individuate by origins. Thus, we naturally group of both the early and late stages of the output

process into something attributable to the agent, while grouping only late stages of the input is intended to

be neutral between different theories process into something attributable to the perceiver. This idea of

grouping is intended to be neutral between different theories of the ontology of action. Since early stages

of the input process are grouped together into the perception of knowledge or perception, there is

corresponding bloc to conceiving it as mental. In short, if the causal explanation of the action cite only

mental states immediately preceding the action, it would omit those on which deliberation was based, and

thereby miss the rationality of the action.84

Sen argues that when a student gets education he becomes

aware of the need for conservation. Likewise, as Sen insists, if a woman gets gainful employment, she

realizes the usefulness of conservation, including ill effects of “global warming.” But the problem is that

an externalist mental state normally cannot be decomposed as the conjunction of purely internal and

purely external components. Sen’s causal explanation of cation is frequently concerned with the structure

of the agent’s deliberation. However, deliberation frequently occurs sometime before the moment of

action. In short, to confine the explanation of action to the instant before action is to omit much what

makes action as rational.

In sum, reduced to its essentials, Durkheimian sociological reasoning shows that social

relationship is mechanical and organic solidarity, but Sen’s cognitive propensity for philosophical inter-

connections allow us to engage with wider range of multiple inter-subjectivities.

Causation in Environmental Ethics

The above noted discussion leads us to the theory of causation. A cause, according to the Nyaya

theory of causation, is defined as an unconditional and invariable consequent of a cause. The same cause

produces the same effect and the same effect is produced by the same cause. Plurality of causes is ruled

out. The first essential feature of a case is its antecedence – the fact that it should precede the effect. The

second is its invariability, it must invariably precede the effect. The third is it’s unconditionally

antecedence is immediate and direct antecedence and excludes the fallacy or remote cause. Hus, we see

that Nyaya definition of a cause is the same as that in Western inductive logic. Hume defines a cause as

an invariable antecedent. Carveth Read points out that unconditionally includes immediacy. A cause,

thus, is an unconditional, immediate and invariable antecedent of an effect. The inherent cause, the non-

84

T. Williamson, Knowledge and its Limits, p. 76.

25

inherent cause, the efficient cause and the purpose correspond to Aristotle’s material, formal and final

causes. In this sense, the human intentional factor toward “development” for immediate gratification is

the immediate cause of nature’s destruction.

The developmental global design of the European Renaissance was the earlier constitutive of

modernity and of its darker side. Transcendentalists were like the consequentialists whose motives look if

the state of affairs that results from the motive to choose an action is better or at least as good as of the

alternative state of affairs that would have resulted from alternative actions. This cause gives relevance to

the motive of an act and links it to its consequence. It simply, “Nature” is the focal point for much

transcendentalist thought and writing. As a theme, it is so central to the movement that Emerson’s

cornerstone essay is entitles “Nature” and serves as an investigation into nature and its relationship to the

soul. For transcendentalists, Nature and Soul were inextricably connected. In the rhythms and seasons of

the natural world, transcendentalists found comfort and divinity. In the increasingly industrialized and

fragmented world in which they lived, the search for meaning in nature was of great significance. In the

USA, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), Henry David Thoreau 91817-1862), Margaret Fuller (181-

1850), Theodore Parker (1810-1860), Bronson Alcott (1799-1888), O. Brownson (1803-1876), and others

saw a possibility of liberation, and beauty in nature. Transcendentalism refuses to accept the Hobbesian

rationality that says all of man’s voluntary acts are aimed at self-pleasure or self-preservation. Of course,

Hobbes (1588-1679) argues that good is an object of desire, a term that must be used in relation to a

person. At least, although a subjectivist, Hobbes brings ethics into the modern era in the West. Hare

(Moral Thinking, 1981) offers a new understanding in ethics by arguing that universalizing of ethics

prevent us from giving us greater weight to our own interests, simply on the grounds that they are our

mine.

Cognitive Justification in Ethics

In his transcendental vein, Sen argues about morality in environmental justice that is part of an

evolutionary package with all our prized cognitive capabilities. However, the question remains: How do

we argue that we are all dependent on the biosphere like other life-forms, and thus, need to speak in

epistemological language applicable to both man and nature? The health problems in such cities are really

of environmental origin. What transcendentalists argue is that morality in environmental justice is part of

an evolutionary package dealing with all of our prized cognitive abilities. Indirectly, it implies that

morality imposes constraints on the pursuit of self-interest at an action-theoretic level. However, many

moral philosophers believe that morality imposes restrictions on the pursuit of social justice. The

deontologist argues that even the best outcome from the moral point of view may still impose further

constraints on the means that one may employ in order to achieve that outcome.85

Of course this debate

may not divert us from our central question about the environmental ethics that can be profitably adhered

to if not practiced. The notion of specialization in Indian agriculture the appropriate relationship of the

ecological factor occupied by specialized producers to the wider regional networks of production and

exchange has been raised in some historical works. The effect of uncontrolled population growth are often

compounded by the consequence of rapid urbanization in that led to widespread destruction of

vegetation, soil loss and a decline in productivity of the land-base in India.

If a revealed preference is not well-grounded, contingent valuation also does not appear to be

sound. Sen argues that plurality of values that we associate with the environment cannot be represented

by a single measure, for instance, money. A monetary standard does not view that there can be a single

standard against with relative worth of all other values can be judged. The real issue is who could be the

85

Joseph Heath, Following the Rule, pp. 101-102.

26

gainer and who is the loser? Goodwin offers a solution by arguing that the “green theory” of agency’s

autonomy should be subordinated to “green theory of value.” Clarifying the reasoning, Eckersley adds

that the green theory of value should be expand non-human beings to incorporate the value of agency’s

autonomy – the freedom of human and non-human beings to unfold in their respective ways.86

This

means nature is “public good” and the consumption of a particular person may not reduce the

consumption of others. In resource allocation, capability of one person may not infringe on the rights of

another. Distribution decision, Sen adds, of an un-crowded public work, involve conflict between one

agent and another, raising a dilemma in human rights choices in conservation ethics. Sen’s approach to

environmental evaluation has some similarity with that Marx, who captures the essence of the

development, defined most famously by the Brbrundtland Commission as “development which meets the

needs of the present without compromising the ability of the future generations to meet their needs.” For

Marx, the ‘consciousness and rational treatment of the land as permanent property’ are “the inalienable

condition for the existence and reproduction of the chain of human generations.” He insists that even an

entire society or all societies together cannot be the owners of the earth, they are simply its possessors,

and have to bequeath it in improved stage to successive generations.”

Following this sequence in cognitive understanding, the fixation idea is avoided by Sen who

argues that causality is not out of the point. The idea of absolute truth would become meaningless if there

is nothing to set it an art against or relate it to. The key to flexibility of real or true which is being widened

in its definition through comparisons. In short, the sunnyata or the Doctrine of Emptiness is certainly

empty itself. Bur for the philosopher Murti, “Negation is not total annulment but comprehension without

abstraction, and the concept thus calls for an inclusive attitude toward all, including nature and

environment.iv Gudmansen’s interpretation of a Buddhist hermeneutic can place a Western modern

philosopher in a refreshing perspective that may passes thorough the reducing value of changing Western

philosophical pre-occupation. Gudmansen’s contention is that Wittgenstein’s linguistic turn provides the

basis for a new interpretation of Buddhist “middle way,” which should replace the Kantian and idealist

approaches that have dominate the reasoning process since the Romantic era. Indian philosophers from

the second/third-century have found a way in which ambiguities and mystifications inherent in language

are replaced by a wider perspective, a process partly similar to the critical perspective of Nietzsche’s

critique of traditional Western ways of argument that says, “Nagarjuna’s (200 A.D.) dialectical analysis

of the common categories … by which we comprehend it are self-contradictory and incoherent.” The idea

of the approach to philosophizing is to get away from talking to one another in favor of talking with one

another.

If these arguments in relativity are correct, a persuasive case against permanent geological

disposal of radio-waste can be made on the basis of environmental justice and the uncertainty, inequity,

and lack of free informed consent of affected persons. In addition to this “middle way,” there are legal

grounds for arguing that the repositories are likely to violate environmental justice. Currently, both of the

high Charter of the United Nations speaks of saving “succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”

Within the Anglo-American legal system, property law also provides one of best examples of concern for

temporal environmental justice and for restraints on present generations who might impair the

opportunities of the future generations. If we accept these arguments, permanent geological disposal of

radio-waste is highly questionable on grounds of environmental injustice. These ethical grounds include

potential temporal violations of both distributive and participatory justice, inability to justify second-party

consent of behalf of the future generations, and threats to their due process rights.87

86

Krsistin-Shader-Frechette, Environmental Justice, pp. 4-8. 87

Kristin Shrader-Frechette, Risk and Rationality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

27

For Heidegger, the world can speak well when we leave metaphysis. Language as so conceived

does not pretend to be giving the one true story any more than language does in Rorty’s view. Narrative

arising from different settings give expression to being-in-the world in various ways.88

Sartre, like

Heidegger, insists that our daily activities are intrinsically social as they reveal our existence in a

community, even in the absence of concrete others. In disagreement with Heidegger, Sartre takes inter-

subjectivity to be the first and foremost, a question of conflict rather than of peaceful co-existence. Rorty

dismantles the correspondence theory of the foundationalist epistemology with the hope of finding a way

for the transcendental subject to touch the real world upon the world of words, but unfortunately, he keeps

the transcendental subject in place, making sequences of conversations after conversations. When this

transcendental subject, in the post-modern analysis, is deconstructed, we are again left with the world and

words in it. Heidegger, for instance, opts for a new relation to language altogether, one which results from

a meditative openness to the world. The philosopher Jim Cheney argues that although these abstractions

are fully intelligible only within the paradigm settings which gave birth to them, such abstractions can

achieve a life of their own. They can be articulated in accordance with rules of coherence and made into

apparently self-contained wholes ready for export and practical application to a variety of situations.

Conclusion: Evolutionary Environmental Ethics: Coping with Realities

Vast squatter communities in Calcutta, New Delhi, Madras and Bombay are springing up in the

peri-urban fringes of these cities. If the connection between the subject and reason can be established as

knowledge, then it will be apparent that those who desire to improve condition of justice for humans and

nature will cultivate the kind of breadth which is required for a successful exercise of transcendental

experiences, applicable to almost all situations. Urbanization itself has increasingly given rise to other

environmental problems affecting other areas. The high level of consumption that is directly connected to

the overuse of the resources of the planet and the terrible waste problems that caused global warming,

ozone depletion and our current destruction of habitat, all of these mismanagement issues has generated

huge physical problems that are bringing us to the brink of evolutionary breakdown. In an urban setting,

we live in a human-created environment, surrounded by other people plus a few domesticated plants and

animals, as well as pests that have overcome our defenses. Yet, we are biological beings, as dependent on

the biosphere as any other life form and we rely on our injurious animal nature at our peril.

Transcendental views are not merely contextual, because human beings are able to distinguish between

what is right from the wrong under all environmental conditions. My current paper concludes that

morality can been presented variously.

The concept of “positional agency” (Benedicte Zimmermann) and the notion of Sen’s concept of

“positional objectivity” have the same epistemological meaning. The idea of positional objectivity seeks

to criticize the illusion of an objectivity defined in the form of invariance with respect to individual

observers and their positions, and calls for a critical evaluation of both subjectivism and cultural

relativism. For Sen, the capability approach shifts the economic debate from the generic individual toward

the person’s plurality raising a central question: the issue of generality and the issue of singularity in the

overall discussion about environmental justice. Understanding and Reason in which the former means the

empirical truth and the latter, refers to the absolute truth transcending sense, experience and directly

perceived by intuition.

However, on the closer inspection, the measure of human functioning misses a significant

element of well-being of nature and man, namely the affective value. The real measure of functioning

comes initially from our capability, but there are two fundamental approaches to measurement of both

88

Jim Cheney, “Postmodern Environmental Ethics: Ethics as Bioregional Narrative,” Environmental Ethics, p. 119.

28

capability and functioning (Sen). Our functioning that we choose in conservation is ipso facto, being the

most-valued functioning, and yet, we choose a functioning for several reasons. Consequently, we must

rely on cognitive empathy that allows us build a bridge between our inner eternal transcendental

aspiration and real world of nature and man. If Leibniz rules out any real interaction between body and

soul, it is not just because they are contradictory in nature, one material and the other spiritual, but

because for Leibniz there is no possibility of any real relationship obtaining between two substances, his

own solution resting on what he calls the reality of ordained harmony effected by perception.

For Sen, the transcendental world does not exist apart from us, apart from our sense perceptions

because to exist is to exist first in our perception. The concept of “world-view” that was first encountered

among the Greek skeptics is substantially broader in meaning than the concept of philosophy. No matter

from what direction the thinker proceeds along the “philosophical road,” he must cross the bridge known

as the “basic question of philosophy.” As he does so, he must decide side of the philosophical debate he

will remain: the materialist or the idealist. He may find himself in the position of dualism, recognizing

two equal and independent substances – material and spiritual.89

Despite the reality that thinking about

philosophical ideas in moral transcendental philosophy looks unusual for the modern man, an

understanding of the differences between sensation, i.e., materialism and transcendence, i.e., idealism

used to be basic to transcendence philosophy. Indian religious teachings, in part, had impact on the

mystical elements of “Transcendentalism,” which states every individual has a divine source and must be

free to achieve its full power; that is the reason that transcendentalists favored social reforms.90

There is a

common transcendental philosophy: a conscious man is capable of improving the environment, without

any divine intervention. I have argued that deeply held Indian hermeneutical stance, one which the

judicious use of Skinner’s methods (Skinner, Visions, 2002) can help us better to understand.

Finally, Amartya Sen, a Nobel economist tuned philosopher by choice as well as his strong life-

long association with Tagore’s Santiniketan, Nature’s Abode in rural West Bengal, concludes that an

ethicist in sustainability of nature concept should be fully aware of the relation between pebbles and

human world and thoughts, between causes and deliberate action. Three mysteries loom large: (a)

physical objects appear to be conscious beings like you and me; (b) that appearances are synthesized into

a coherent common sense; and (c) that collectively we really seem to making progress to make sense of

our physical world and human souls making claim that we have “knowledge.”91

Transcendentalism has a

duty to decode these mysteries, and so far, analysts in the West and West have not come near to that

position.

89

A. Spirkin, “Dialectical Materialism: Philosophy as a Worldview and a Methodology,” http://www.marxist.org/reference/archive/spirkin/workd/dislectical-materialism/ch01-s02 (accessed 2/12/2014). 90

Alireza Manzari, “Contextual American Transcendentalism,” Theory and Practice in Language Studies, vol. 2, no. 9 (September, 2012), pp. 1792-1801. 91

Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind, pp. 350-351.