Ecological citizenship: a Defence

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Hayward believes that 'no non-self-contradictory answer is available to the question of how political and moral obligations can be distinguished in the terms of his Dobson's theory' (p.4). The reasons for this scepticism are not entirely clear to me, but they seem to be based on the view that, for me, 'obligations are obligations of citizenship as distinct from morality, when they are created by the political community' (p. 4; emphasis in the original). Not really; obligations of citizenship are distinct from obligations of morality in that the former are political, in the sense of derived from justice, and the latter are not. Unequal occupation of ecological space, a fact which brings ecological citizenship into being, is a matter of justice, not of humanitarianism, and it is this which makes it – non-contradictorily – a matter of politics and not of morality. 2. I hope I will not be asked to explain why people should feel motivated to do justice, as this is a task that has confounded much more powerful minds than my own.