Relational Moral Agency: Beyond Constructivism and Naturalism

The dichotomy between human and nature is often cited by environmentalists as one of the main crimes resulting from the predominant Western worldview. The most destructive element in this dichotomy is, from the viewpoint of environmental ethics, the idea that it entails the boarders of moral domain: humans should be taken morally into account on their own right, while other natural entities are just instrumentally relevant for moral. Therefore, much of the theoretically oriented environmental ethics has been focused on searching for one or another way out of this dichotomy. There are, roughly said, two ways to overcome the dichotomy between human members of the moral community and the other beings not having access to the domain of morally relevant things on their own behalf: (1) showing that the others share some property of moral relevance with human agents, or (2) giving up with the exceptionality of humans as moral subjects. The latter – namely an argument against the exceptionality of moral agency that is praised in modern ethics as a necessary condition for values and responsibility – has been put forward by two approaches of philosophical anthropology: social constructivism and naturalism. In this chapter I will introduce some key points of criticism against the modernist conception of moral agency posed by ecofeminists on the one and, and by evolutionary ethicists on the other hand. I argue that there are parallel interests included in these ecologically oriented modest forms of constructivism and naturalism to seek for a conception of moral agency beyond the hardwired constructivist and naturalist explanations. Both lines of thought seem to aim at some sort of relational conception of human moral agency.