Insuring an Indefinite Future: Sustainability as a Consequence of Royce’s Moral Vision

Introduction

The study of community is an integral part of pragmatist thought, as is the continual reminder to reconstruct and re-evaluate our theories in light of changing conditions. A contemporary, literal, and significant source of changing conditions is anthropogenic global climate change, conjoined with a general increase in concern for non-human life. Already, a great deal of work has been done on applying pragmatist conceptions and insights to these issues.¹ However, other pragmatist resources remain to be marshaled. One such resource is Josiah Royce’s philosophy of insurance, which, while primarily offered as a way of preventing international conflicts, also concerned the mitigation of natural calamities, such as “floods, famines, pestilences, earthquakes, and volcanoes” (Royce, War and Insurance xii). These calamities, and others such as the record-breaking drought currently affecting Royce’s native California (as of March 2015), will likely become more serious in the twenty-first century as we deal with the consequences of pollution and the ensuing anthropogenic climate changes.

Re-articulating Royce’s arguments in War and Insurance and applying them directly to current problems is more than can be done in a paper of this length (although see Armour for an important effort in this direction). Instead, this paper proposes reaching into some of Royce’s earlier works to understand why he considered insurance “the most fruitful of all communities of interpretation” (Royce, War and Insurance 96). In particular, his work on the metaphysics and ethics of communities grounds an inchoate commitment to sustaining said communities and their environments over time. Section 1 sketches Royce’s argument that his idealism entails a specific, and inclusive, concept of our relationship to Nature, while section 2 shows how the principle of loyalty to loyalty entails a duty to promote the health of ourselves and others. Section 3 offers a suggestion as to how insurance functions as a community of expectation, and highlights Royce’s explicit interest in managing environmental risk.

1. Social Consciousness and the Time-Process

In a pair of articles in The Philosophical Review of 1895 entitled “Self-Consciousness, Social Consciousness, and Nature,” Royce seeks to apply his idealistic metaphysics to the question of humanity’s relation to nature. While these articles are explicitly theoretical, concerning Cosmology as a topic of special metaphysics, I would like to suggest some practical consequences of the view Royce develops. Here is his general argument: first, Royce contends that self-consciousness necessarily derives from some form of social consciousness. That is, he rejects the position that self-consciousness is fundamental as untrue to human nature: “On the contrary, I am conscious of my self, on the whole, as in some relation to some real or ideal fellow, and apart from my consciousness of my fellows I have only secondary and derived states and habits of self-consciousness” (Royce, “Self-Consciousness, Social Consciousness, and Nature I” 468). This is much as we would expect from Royce and other pragmatists—the self is fundamentally social, and any conception of the self is developed through contrast with other selves. This is also the same gambit that Royce uses in developing his conception of the Absolute as a non-finite social self inclusive of all other selves. Here, however, Royce turns this insight toward a conception of nature.

Royce’s next move is to argue that our very conception of physical reality derives from our conception of other social beings: “Yet all that manifests to us the external existence of nature does so by virtue of a more or less definite appeal to the categories of our social consciousness” (Royce, “Self-Consciousness, Social Consciousness, and Nature I” 472). Part of the proof of this claim involves the various evidence, and a reinterpretation of that evidence, provided by the theory of evolution, which Royce sees as “the beginning of what promises to become a sort of universal Sociology, tending toward a definition of the social relations of the finite beings that together must make up the whole natural world, both human and extra-human” (Royce, “Self-Consciousness, Social Consciousness, and Nature I...