Environmental Skill: Motivation, Knowledge, and the Possibility of a Non-Romantic Environmental Ethics by Mark Coeckelbergh (review)

In Environmental Skill: Motivation, Knowledge, and the Possibility of a Non-Romantic Environmental Ethics, Mark Coeckelbergh presents an expansive approach to rethinking the ontological, epistemic, and ethical relationships humans have with the environment. It is a book with a wide historical scope rooted in the Western tradition, and it seeks to address the gap between humans’ ecological ideals and environmental practices.

The text begins with an exploration of the psychological conditions for environmental change. Coeckelbergh seeks to bridge the gap between what we believe we should do and what we actually do. In other words, he is seeking to provide a solution to the theory-action gap. The theory-action gap with regard to environmental ethics pertains to situations in which theoretically we know what we ought to do with regard to the environment (broadly speaking, provide for ecosystemic health) but what we are actually doing (broadly speaking, undermining the continuation of life as we know and value it on this planet) fails to reflect this. Central to this discussion is a concern about sufficient environmental moral motivation.

The age-old problem of akrasia (usually translated as weakness of the will) is addressed, as is the moral psychology operating in the background. In the Protagoras, Socrates notes that when people fail to act in the way they morally ought to it is a manifestation of ignorance. When people manifest bad behavior, it is due to lacking adequate knowledge—Socrates argues “that ‘if someone were to know what is good and bad, then he would not be forced by anything to act otherwise than knowledge dictates’ (352c)” (15). No one goes willingly toward the bad on Socrates’ view, being overwhelmed by pleasure is a form of ignorance (15). This can be contrasted with Aristotle in Book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics where he contends that when we knowingly do wrong, it is due to our passions ruling our rational mind; it is a failure of the will rather than a manifestation of ignorance (17). We find a similar move in Plato’s Phaedrus, in this dialogue the soul is imagined as a charioteer being pulled by two horses; one horse represents rationality and morality and the other irrational passions and appetites (18).

Insofar as the problem of environmental moral motivation hangs on a failure to maintain control over our divided psyche, Coeckelbergh takes Harry Frankfurt’s distinction between first-order desires (e.g. the desire to do X) and second-order desires which are reflections on first order desires (e.g. the desire not to want to desire X) to be of use (18). Rather than due to ignorance, the failure to do what is environmentally morally correct, one can argue, is due to a divided psyche in which we are failing to restrain our passions and appetites, which are pulling us from what rationality demands (19). Additional explanations of the disconnect between intention and behavior are explored such as lacking pro-environment social norms, lacking direct experience with nature, lacking an adequate sense of the capacity to change things, and lacking adequate exposure to exemplars. Some positive directions for successfully motivating pro-environmental behavior thus include having social norms that encourage such behavior, having direct experience with the environment, feeling that we can in fact change things, and having access to moral exemplars (34, 38–39).

Coeckelbergh takes as centrally problematic the construal of nature in both the Enlightenment and Romantic traditions. He contends that contemporary environmentalism is the heir to the Enlightenment face of modernity, given its basis in science and the promotion of the manipulation of nature (43). Enlightenment modernity fails to give its due to the moral sentimental side of the Enlightenment (e.g. the work of Adam Smith and David Hume are neglected) (47). Insofar as environmental ethics assumes modern ways of doing and thinking (and more particularly dualistic rationalist ways of doing and thinking...