Associate Professor Peter Burdon Deputy Dean at the Adelaide Law School, University of Adelaide, Australia
My interest in the ethic of responsibility emerges in the context of the Anthropocene – a geological epoch which recognises the power of a very small group of humans to rupture the Earth system. A focus on human power has captured many responses to the Anthropocene. But there is another side to this – human power has increased so too has power in the Earth system. Taken together there is more power at work on Earth and humans don’t wield the majority.
We are grappling and stumbling for the right language to describe this state. Some authors have returned to the idea of “Gaia” while others argue that the Earth has “awakened” and now seeks her revenge. Within this chorus (or cacophony) other voices note that the Earth has always had its own agency – this is something that Sophie Chao has brought out powerfully in her scholarship on morethanhuman worlds.
The Human Condition today finds us in an increasingly heteronomous world where we no longer have a monopoly on agency. My own attempt to grapple with this has led to a focus on stories that exhibit something of a will beyond human beings. These are not hard to find but here I focus on a version of the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” by the great German writer Goethe. I am not the first to draw this comparison and I acknowledge the prior scholarship of thinkers like Clive Hamilton and Ron Engel.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
In the poem, a powerful Sorcerer departs his sanctuary and leaves his apprentice to study. The apprentice is filled with youthful conviction of his own power and mastery over the elements. He is impatient to feel power and believes that he can activate and control his master’s magic:
I'm now master,
I 'm tactician,
All his ghosts must do my bidding.
Know his incantation,
Spell and gestures too;
By my mind's creation
Wonders shall I do.
Those who have watched Disney’s 1940 adaptation will be familiar with the next part of the story. The apprentice commands a broom and basin of water to perform his chores. The apprentice, however, is unable to control the power he has unleashed. How does he react? Not with humility and grace but anger and a renewed attempt to assert his dominance:
No, no longer
Shall I suffer
You to offer
Bold defiance.
I have brains,
I am the stronger
And I shall enforce compliance.
I won’t tell all of the story but of course this pattern continues and as things spiral out of control the apprentice becomes increasingly desperate. Humility is beyond him and when magic fails the apprentice turns to brute force…he picks up an axe and chops a broom in two. But like the Hydra in Greek Mythology the broom does not break. It multiples and continues to sweep. At the risk of overdoing my simile, the broom has an interiority and agency that the apprentice cannot control. Many of these old stories have a similar ending – a higher power enters and saves the day. In this instance, the Sorcerer returns home and restores order with the slightest gesture.
The reception of this story is instructive. It was told during a period of folk tradition, when people believed in powers beyond the human. And while it can be read as a religious story (salvation through a higher power) it is more properly understood as pre-ethical in the sense that the message derives from a world in which the Apprentice is not a moral agent but someone who seeks to go beyond moral laws. Its intention is to present a warning against those who seek to rise above the proper bounds of human agency. In the last three centuries a small minority of humans have used industrial capitalism to trick themselves into thinking that they have graduated from apprentice to Sorcerer. In so doing they have also endangered the majority of the world.
Responsibility in the Anthropocene
What kind of legal and ethical response is adequate to this violence? As Clive Hamilton observes: “if the human impact has been so powerful that it has deflected the Earth from its natural geological path, describing the state of affairs as “unethical” or “unlawful” seems to be some kind of category error.” Traditional ethics also risks trivialising what has been done and normalizing an event without parallel. We are living through what Alex Steffen calls “discontinuity”: “a moment where the experience and expertise you’ve built up over time cease to work”. This is not just an intellectual understanding but emotional as well: “There’s the shock that comes with recognizing that you are unprepared for what has already happened.”
I find myself reeling from this shock and can only offer inadequate reflections on a way forward. Our work begins, I think, by sitting with the duality of an increase in power for a small minority of humans and more power in the Earth system. This is not a responsibility we can discharge by withdrawing and expecting the environment to return to some kind of “natural state” (to me that is an impossibility and not desirable). We also cannot discharge our duty through neoliberal attempts to personalise responsibility and share it out equally amongst human kind (the term Anthropocene participates in this logic). Better that our ethical anger and proposals for reform are directed at the 100 companies responsible for climate change, species extinction and biodiversity loss.
For me, responsibility in the Anthropocene means that we situate human freedom not in relation to other humans but as emerging from nature-as-a-whole. This is a pre-ethical position in the same sense as I discussed Goethe’s poem. In law, it is also something that I think is better dealt with using the language of obligations (rather than rights). While there is no need to cast obligations in opposition to rights, I feel some compulsion to do so because of the way rights have come to dominate approaches to environmental protection and crowd out alternative justice claims. Following Susan Marks, I have also become increasingly concerned by the way rights are marked by their history and can be manipulated to serve capital accumulation. I won’t say more about this now but I think that rights enable us to externalise the problem and project western legal concepts onto nature. But the problem is not ‘out there’. The problem, as I have been repeating, is with a privileged minority who act with wanton neglect or self-indulgent gluttony.
If embeddedness in nature provides a reason for responsibility what is our motivation? Some writers claim that there is none. Hamilton, for example, argues that for all of its worthiness, “appeals to responsibility have no heft, no ontological substance.” I have some sympathy with this conclusion – particularly as someone who has observed COP negotiations and participated in environmental activism for decades. But it also feels like a conclusion drawn out from despair or as assuming that ethical motivation requires a higher being to love or fear. Be that God or Gaia.
Clearly a new ethics cannot be conjured from thin air – it awaits realisation and articulation by humans fully inhabiting a new epoch. While not adequate, I suggest that we might take our first tentative steps in conversation with Hans Jonas (for a longer discussion see here). And while I don’t have the space for a proper ring composition, I just note that Jonas drew heavily on Goethe’s poetry (and the sorcerer’s apprentice) during his graduation exams and the formulation of his writing on responsibility.
Jonas’s “Imperative of Responsibility” was written at the dawn of the Anthropocene and is marked by his experience during the Second World War. As an active member of the Jewish Brigade of the British Army, Jonas had direct experience of what he described as “the apocalyptic state of things, the threatening collapse of the world [and] the climatic crisis of civilization.” It feels impossible that a person could experience the technology of death camps and the dropping of two atomic bombs and not reach a similar conclusion. Indeed, for Jonas the “qualitatively novel nature of certain of our actions has opened up a whole new dimension of ethical relevance for which there is no precedent in the standards and canons of traditional ethics.”
Rather than advancing a theory of rights, Jonas worked against the grain and focused on proposals that restricted human action. In his words: the ‘lengthened reach of our deeds’ pushed obligations into the ‘center of the ethical stage’. Sadly, for us, Jonas did not have a neat trick for motivating this sense of responsibility – instead he noted that people’s hearts and minds must be engaged:
For that enjoinder to reach and affect me, so that it can move the will, I must be receptive for appeals for this kind. Our emotional side must come into play. And it is indeed of the essence of our moral nature that the appeal, as insight transmits it, finds an answer in our feeling. It is the feeling of responsibility.
In part, this is why I am interested in stories and fables – they tap into an emotional centre that logic and fact can miss. To borrow from Hume – “Reason is the slave of the passions in the sense that practical reason alone cannot give rise to moral motivation.”
I am not holding out Jonas (or any other theorist) as a Panacea for our problems. There are clear limits in his writings and ideas that we would jettison. But we could do worse than enter into conversation with a thinker who looked directly into the heart of evil in the 20th century and responded with compassion, and a sense that we could be better than our past suggested. That is exactly the sort of mindset we need in thinking about future directions for responsibility in Environmental Law.