The value of sustainability and the sustainability of value
Anthony Simon Laden
University of Illinois at Chicago
Fall 2016
What kind of problem is climate change? Could it be the kind of problem the
solution to which philosophy might have something to contribute? And what
kind of problem is that? In what follows, I suggest a role philosophy might play
in formulating a response to climate change, and outline a series of thoughts that
suggest at least one response philosophy might help us to see. As my title
suggests, that role has to do with (re)-drawing the conceptual space occupied by
value and sustainability. But first, there is some ground-clearing work to be
done concerning different types of problems.
We can distinguish broad categories of types of problems in terms of
the kinds of resources that we would need to solve or at least respond to them.
According to this taxonomy, then, to ask what kind of problem a problem is aims
to ask what sort of thing might count as or contribute to a solution to it. Among
the categories of problems we can then describe will be what I will call
engineering, institutional and political problems. Aspects of climate change fit
into all of these boxes.
What I am calling engineering problems admit of technological or at least
technical solutions. Building a bridge across a gorge is an engineering problem
insofar as what I need to know is what sort of structure made with what sort of
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materials can span the gorge and withstand whatever environmental stressors it
is likely to encounter. But so is figuring out the proper interest rate to keep
inflation or unemployment rates below a certain threshold. Thinking of climate
change as an engineering problem means thinking of it as a problem having to
do with figuring out what level of carbon in the atmosphere or global
temperature rise would trigger catastrophic and uncontrollable results and then
figuring out what technical and technological fixes could avoid that. Those who
look to human ingenuity in the invention of new ways to harness non-fossil
energy sources or capture carbon are thinking of climate change as an
engineering problem, but so are those who think it is a matter of setting the right
policies: setting the right price for carbon or investing a certain percentage of
GDP in research or renewable energy.
In contrast, to approach a problem as an institutional problem is to look for
solutions that involve changing existing or establishing new institutions that can
address the problem. Institutional problems may require technical fixes as well,
but what marks an institutional problem is that though we may know what
needs to be done, we have no way of collectively doing it with the institutions we
currently have. The problems humans have living together are pictured as
institutional when philosophers ask whether the inconveniences of the state of
nature can be solved by the establishment of a state or a constitution. Many
smaller collective action problems are also institutional in this sense. A few years
ago, UIC began an ambitious hiring program that involved funding faculty lines
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in a set of new interdisciplinary faculty “clusters.” These clusters were rather
informal collections of faculty whose research interests overlapped enough to
warrant thinking that there might be added benefit bringing other people within
that range to campus. But the clusters, unlike departments, have no by-laws or
membership criteria. In fact, they have no formal procedures of collective
decision making at all, and this complicated the process of deciding whom to
hire. This is an institutional problem insofar as it might be addressed by each
cluster adopting by-laws and procedures.
To the extent that we think that climate change is an institutional problem, it
is because we think of it as a coordination problem: what is needed is some
global mechanism by which countries can commit to and be held to their
commitments to reduce emissions or capture carbon or adopt the various
technical fixes that would avoid catastrophic outcomes. Those who hold out
hope for the Kyoto protocol or the Paris agreement are treating climate change as
at least in part an institutional problem.
Closely related to institutional problems are what might be called political
problems. Whereas institutional problems require a mechanism for collective
action, political problems occur when what is lacking is something like collective
will. The tendency of states to run budget deficits or to underfund long-term
investments or commitments, like pensions or infrastructure, and the failure of
cities to integrate their public schools are political problems insofar as even when
it is well-known what range of technical fixes are needed and the institutional
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structures are in place to enact these fixes, there remains a collective
unwillingness to pay the costs associated with doing these things, to change, for
instance, the distribution of power or privilege. If you think of climate change as
primarily a political problem, then you think what is needed is the formation of a
new collective will to bear the near-term costs associated with the measures that
would address global warming. The thought here is that even if we have the
technical solutions and the institutional means to implement them, we could still
face a problem because we haven’t collectively decided that the ends are worth
the costs they will require to achieve. Those who work to form and spark social
movements and raise consciousness about our predicament are treating climate
change as in part a political problem.
As this brief taxonomy suggests, problems can cut across these categories,
and climate change certainly does. Moreover, the adequacy of a solution to one
sort of problem may very well be shaped by the nature of the other sorts of
problems we face. What technical solutions are available to confront climate
change will depend on the institutional means for implementing them and the
strength of our collective political will, and vice versa. Blocks to political willformation may inhibit the development or proper functioning of the institutions
we need or the support of the development of promising technological fixes.
And problems of one sort can be caused and made worse by problems of a
different sort. But to address a given problem as a certain type of problem is to
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be involved in looking for a certain type of solution, and thus misdiagnosing
what sort of problems we face can lead us to fail in our search for solutions.
If philosophy is going to be of help in responding to real-world problems,
then this will be because there are also properly philosophical problems:
problems whose solutions require the resources of philosophy. One sort of
philosophical problem arises when the manner in which we conceptually frame a
topic obscures possible solutions or diverts our sense of what the problem is.
The solution to such a problem requires working through new conceptual
possibilities for describing the situation we face, and that is one of the things
philosophy is in the business of doing.1
Let me try to make that thought a bit clearer: You can think of our concepts
as tools we use to make sense of the world and our lives: they function
something like lenses through which we look out at the world. And like any set
of lenses, concepts serve to make certain features of the landscape clear and
perspicuous and while occluding or otherwise obscuring other parts.
Philosophical problems arise when our habitual concepts hamper our seeing
clearly some feature of the world that we need to see clearly to grasp and
respond to a given situation.
So understood, philosophical problems are not necessarily abstract or
concerned with abstruse metaphysical issues. What marks them, in contrast, is
I am going to be rather sloppy here and throughout with my use of “we.” And it is certainly a fair
question as to whether that generates problems for the points I want to make. One way to hear my
use of “we” that makes it perhaps less inexcusably sloppy is that it is what might be called
“invitational”: It is shorthand for “I do/think this, do you?”
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the kind of solution they require. To give you an example, apart from the
technical, institutional and political problems associated with human living
together, you might think there are also certain philosophical problems. Here is
one, discussed by John Rawls.2 Humans can only live together peacefully if they
are willing to make certain kinds of sacrifices, such as compromising the
achievement of their ends in order to make room for others to pursue possibly
conflicting ends. One barrier to achieving the political will to make such
sacrifices is a belief that the possible payoff of such sacrifices is illusory, a
chimera. If, for instance, you thought that under conditions of pluralism, there is
no possibility for achieving a just and legitimate constitutional democracy, then
it would be rather hard to muster the will to do what is required to live under
and sustain such a regime. In other words, the political problem of mustering the
necessary will to implement the necessary institutional and technical solutions
that facilitate peaceful co-existence turns on the solution to a conceptual problem:
showing the possibility of such a regime. In Rawls’s terms, philosophical work is
needed to secure our reasonable faith in the possibility of a constitutional
democracy: we need to develop a new way of thinking about constitutional
democracy in order to solve this problem. Rawls’s solution is what he calls
political liberalism and the various concepts that make it up. As this example
suggests, many philosophical problems intertwine with the other types of
John Rawls, Political Liberalism, Paperback edition (New York: Columbia Unversity Press, 1996), lxlxii.
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problem, and so addressing a philosophical problem may not obviate the need to
solve the engineering, institutional and political problems it may be associated
with. Nevertheless, it may make the search for the solutions to those problems
more fruitful and more tractable. This, then, is one way to understand the
contribution philosophy can make to addressing complex real-world human
problems.3
Climate change as a philosophical problem
The thought I want to explore in this paper is that climate change is also a
philosophical problem, and that one of the ways in which addressing it through
political, institutional and technical means is likely to be made more difficult is
that we either don’t have, or are not in the habit of using, the most useful
conceptual tools for thinking about it. Moreover, I want to make a suggestion
about the nature of at least one philosophical problem climate change presents,
and what might be some of the benefits of looking at its challenges through a
different set of conceptual lenses.
Here is an outline of the basic thought: One of the blocks to taking action to
respond to climate change is that we do not have the proper conceptual
resources to appreciate the value and the demands of sustainability. Part of the
In this example, the philosophical problem is presented as more foundational than
the political, institutional and technical problems. But this need not always be the
case: We may be hampered in our capacity to think differently about a topic by
political or social structures, or technical barriers. Some technical problems are
made insoluble by underlying philosophical ones, but some philosophical problems
are made insoluble by underlying technical, institutional and political ones.
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problem is with our conception of sustainability, but part of the problem goes
deeper, to some basic conceptual structures we use to even broach questions of
sustainability. The depth of the problem, what makes it potentially interesting
philosophically, is that in order to keep the idea of sustainability front and center
in our thinking, there is work to be done at a somewhat deeper conceptual level,
as it is there that our vision is fixed in a way that makes it hard to think well
about sustainability. That is to say that one of the philosophical problems that
climate change presents is actually a double one: a philosophical problem
preventing us from addressing another philosophical problem. (Nothing in that
claim is meant to deny that there may also be non-philosophical blocks to our
seeing solutions to these problems). Diagnosing where the conceptual blocks
arise and how to shift to a perspective that avoids these blocks will then set us up
to perhaps think more fruitfully about sustainability, to more easily appreciate its
value and what responding appropriately to that value entails. I make some
gestures in that direction at the end of the paper.
Note that this is not the only diagnosis we could make of the philosophical
problem that climate change presents. And in developing it below, I mean to
offer an alternative, though perhaps a complementary one, to at least two other
philosophical diagnoses of the problem. The first diagnosis holds that our
difficulty in thinking about climate change is an example of a more general
problem we have with dealing with very long time horizons and very gradual
change. This is a diagnosis made famous in Al Gore’s film An inconvenient truth,
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with the image of the frog being boiled alive through a very gradual increase in
the temperature of the water. The thought here is that we are generally very bad
at two kinds of intellectual skills that dealing with climate change requires:
properly valuing the distant future, and properly attending to gradual change
that can be momentous over very long time horizons. This is one explanation of
why people and societies under-save for their retirements and have trouble
believing the claims of evolutionary theory or thinking in geological time. And
climate change is precisely such a phenomenon: it is the result of many actions
that are each of only marginal significance, and its effects will fully manifest
themselves only over the course of centuries (or perhaps now, decades). To the
extent that this is part of our conceptual problem, we need ways of appreciating
both the contributing factors and the effects of climate change that don’t play to
our cognitive weaknesses. We can, perhaps, highlight the effects that climate
change is already having, and learn to frame our contributions to it in the way
we frame other marginal contributions we make to collective actions (such as
voting in large elections).
The second diagnosis follows from a position that Akeel Bilgrami has been
developing in recent years and which he draws from a variety of sources, most
notably Gandhi, Marx and various early modern and Romantic radical thinkers.
The idea here is that our inability to think well about climate change is an
example of a more general shift in our thinking about nature over the last several
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centuries that Bilgrami describes in terms of “disenchantment.”4 One effect of
the disenchantment of the world has been a shift in our conception of the natural
world from nature to natural resources, that is, from something we inhabit to
something inert we can master and control. Seeing nature as natural resources
and the world as disenchanted means that we no longer see it as a repository of
values, as something that can make demands on us, and so, not surprisingly, we
have become deaf to its demands. Bilgrami’s diagnosis is subtle and complex
and much better worked out and supported than the one I offer below, so my
development of an alternative is not meant to criticize it or compete with it. I
suspect they are complementary in ways I will try to bring out, and so I will have
to come back to it as my argument unfolds. For now, notice only that this
diagnosis suggests that our conceptual difficulties in addressing climate change
are part of our larger conceptual problems in relating to nature more generally.
The diagnosis I offer here focuses neither on our conception of nature or our
ability to think about long time horizons or individual contributions to collective
actions. It rather focuses on certain difficulties we appear to face in thinking well
about activities and systems that are ongoing rather than aimed at an end. It is
ongoing activities, processes and systems that require sustaining, and where the
value and place of sustainability has its natural home, as it were. If the
conceptual tools we habitually use to make sense of action, processes and
Akeel Bilgrami, “Gandhi (and Marx)” and “The Political Possibilities of the Long Romantic Period,” in
Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014)
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systems are designed for making sense of temporally bounded, end-directed
phenomena, they will lead us astray in various ways when we need to think
about ongoing ones.
One reason to think this might be a fruitful area of exploration is that over a
range of topics we are, in fact, bad at getting considerations of sustainability to
properly engage with the rest of our deliberative processes. Thus, though we
may be able to tell what is required to sustain something, that knowledge more
often than not remains inert. This is certainly true when it comes to
environmental concerns, but I think it is a general problem in acting within
ongoing systems. So, for instance, we are not terribly good at grasping the
importance of the work that sustains our social fabric or the material fabric of our
lives, nor paying proper heed to it in our planning and allocation of time and
resources.5 Our failures here may be overdetermined. Much of that work is
traditionally done by women, and that is generally one explanation for it being
overlooked. But if the diagnosis I develop below is correct, it will turn out that
part of the problem is conceptual. So the question is, why don’t considerations of
sustainability engage with our deliberative processes the way, say,
considerations of morality and prudence do? Why do we either fail to see
This is the work that Hannah Arendt described as “life” in The Human Condition, and I would
argue, one of the fundamental though normally overlooked and underappreciated tasks of public
sector workers in a modern state. One of the ways that movement politics often goes awry is a
failure to attend to the requirements meant to sustain the power the movement generates. For a
fascinating discussion of this in the context of Arendt’s thoughts, see Patchen Markell, “The
Moment has Passed: Power after Arendt” in Radical Future Pasts: Untimely Political Theory, ed. by
Romand Coles, Mark Reinhardt and George Shulman (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
2015), 113-43.
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sustainability as a value, or if we do, why do we fail to respond practically to it in
the way that we respond practically to other values we recognize?
Growth, production and means-end structures
We can make a beginning in appreciating our difficulty in thinking about
sustainability by noticing certain features of systems in which growth is clearly a
value, and why conceiving systems in this way is going to occlude the value of
sustainability. My point below is not to set up sustainability and growth as
competing values, such that we end up seeing the problem of climate change as
one that pits the value of growth against the value of sustainability. Rather, it is
that the background conceptual space that makes it easy to see growth as a value
is also responsible for seeing growth and sustainability as competing values. The
aim here, then, is not to argue for backing a different player in the game, but to
suggest that we might wish to play a different game altogether.
Growth, I want to suggest, becomes an obvious and supreme kind of value
when we conceive of a system as productive. A system is productive if its end is
to generate some product, whether a set of goods or state of affairs (like wealth,
happiness, flourishing, or even a non-carbon economy or a certain level of CO2 in
the atmosphere). Being a productive system is meant to be a structural fact, and
one of rather broad applicability. That is, as the list above suggests, systems can
produce all sorts of things, and debates about the kinds of products that we
should produce can be momentous and nevertheless all work within the same
conceptual framework. Similarly, what counts as a system here is also meant to
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be broad: systems can be natural or artificial, intentionally designed or not, and
involve intentional elements or not. Finally, note that conceiving of a system as
productive is a way of understanding or interpreting it, and is a separate
question from whether it was designed or evolved in order to be productive. My
point is less about what given systems do than how we make sense of them. A
system can generate certain sorts of outcomes or goods without it having to be
understood as a productive system. We sometimes recognize this point by
labeling such goods as “by-products” of a system rather than its products.
To describe a system as productive, then, is to describe it as having an end
that is the production of some or other outcome. Describing a system this way
then leads to us to take a certain approach towards characterizing its value: the
primary value of a productive system will lie in how well it produces its
outcome. Once again, this description is meant to cover a wide and
heterogenous set of cases: systems can produce their outcomes well by doing so
efficiently, or by producing particularly fine exemplars, or producing them in
great quantities. So we can value the system purely in terms of its outputs, or in
terms of the relation between outputs and inputs, but the important point for my
purposes is that the value of the system is tied to its product, and that product is
an outcome of the system: something produced by the system and thus separate
from the system itself.
When we view a system this way, growth becomes an unambiguous value of
the system: growth involves producing more or better outcomes, and if the value
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of the system is tied to its outcomes and the process for producing them, then the
value increases if the outcomes improve: if the system produces more or better
products. In fact, it is easy, once we think of a system as productive, to take the
growth of the system not only to be an unambiguous good of the system, but to
treat it as something the measure of its health or success, and this can lead us to
make its growth a kind of further end. Thus, when we think about altering the
system, or reforming it or trying to improve it, we end up measuring or
evaluating those changes in terms of their effect on the growth of the system, or
more precisely on the growth of its productive capacities. The point here is not
that we cannot evaluate productive systems along other axes or in terms of other
values, but that once we view a system as productive, those other values become
external to the basic logic and point of the system. We thus tend to see them as
secondary in importance to the growth of productivity. Such values are perhaps
nice to realize if we can, but not in a way that should interfere with productivity
growth. Or in some cases, where we do think they can override considerations
of growth, we end up thinking of such values as external constraints on the
system. So, for instance, we might think that there are various moral constraints
on how economic systems operate, but these act as side-constraints, even if they
trump the goals of productivity. If we then try to place sustainability among the
values by which we might evaluate a productive system, we are likely to have a
hard time giving it its proper due. Either it will come off as a secondary value, so
not one which can override the demands of growth, or we will have to make it a
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kind of moral demand so that it can override considerations of growth, or we
will have to show that it is a kind of necessary condition for continued growth
over the long term. Of course, arguments of all three forms are familiar. And all
work from the premise that in a deep sense, sustainability and growth are
competitors in a competition that is stacked from the beginning against
sustainability.
So the first point to note is that if we conceive of systems as productive, it is
going to be hard to see the value of sustainability. But this then leads to the
question as to why we are prone to think of systems as productive. Why not just
change our interpretive framework and think about various systems in a way
that brings out the value of sustainability? While this is ultimately what I want
to suggest, there is another important bit of ground-clearing that needs doing. I
think there are some rather deep reasons why we are drawn to think of systems
as productive, and that has to do with the tools we have for thinking about action
more generally.6
Our tendency to describe and interpret systems as productive is in part
supported by our standard conceptual repertoire for describing and interpreting
action more generally. In particular, the problem lies with the thought that
action is behavior directed at an end. And this, I suspect, is also tied to a general
understanding of reason or meaning which leads us to think that the basic way
Again, this may be a point where the explanation is over-determined. Certainly, various aspects of
neo-liberal ideology support looking at all sorts of systems in terms of productivity, as do a faith in
the value of measurement and quantification and perhaps what Foucault described as the
disciplining of knowledge. Here, there are overlaps with Bilgrami’s genealogy of disenchantment.
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to make sense of an action or show it to be rational is to show how it is wellsuited to producing some end: that, as Candace Vogler nicely puts it, that
practical rationality has means-ends form.7
The notion of an end in the claim that action is behavior directed at an end
can be understood in a wider and a narrower fashion. In order to fix terms, I will
treat the category of end as relatively broad, encompassing not only products
that are distinct from the actions that produce them, but also wholes of which the
actions are parts and states that are realized through the actions (i.e. states that
just are the state of the action being performed).. So, narrowly productive
activities like building a house, baking a cake or writing a paper have ends (the
house, the cake or the paper). But so do purposeful but not productive activities
like walking to get to the store, taking a vacation in order to unwind, and playing
a passage as part of playing a whole piece of music, or even playing a piece of
music for its own sake. And while the relation of an activity to its product is
causal, if we are going to encompass purposeful but non-productive activities,
then we need to focus not on the causal relation, but the rational one: an action is
related to its end by the “in order to” or “for the sake of” relation: by the end
setting out the purpose for the action. Thinking about action as purposeful, as
directed to an end and thus in part rationalized by being a means to that end,
then, is to attend to certain structural features of actions and activities.
7
Candace Vogler, Reasonably Vicious (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).
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Once we take up these conceptual tools for thinking about action, then
thinking of something as an action is just to think of it as directed at an end and
gaining its point and meaning from being so directed. This is what, for instance,
distinguishes action from mere behavior or movement, and similarly what turns
a set of interlocking actions into a system rather than a merely haphazard sets of
happenings. And the point to notice here is that focusing on these structural
features of action makes it more likely that we also think of systems of actions as
productive, and this tendency occludes from view some important features of a
range of actions and activities that are not best interpreted in terms of this
structure.
Before turning to an alternate conceptual framework that will highlight these
functions, I think there is a final level we need to excavate, and that is how we
think about reason and the activity of reasoning. One of the conceptual
structures that leads us to so easily analyze action in terms of its ends is a view of
reason that has a similar shape, what I have elsewhere described as our standard
picture of reason.8 The important and familiar elements here are that the activity
of reasoning is like action as understood above: it is activity directed at an end,
here reaching a conclusion, whether in the form of a belief or a decision, and this
shapes our view of what makes something a reason: it must play a role in getting
us to that conclusion, by being a consideration in favor of something, and this
8
Anthony Simon Laden, Reasoning: A Social Picture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
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then means that reasons have the means-end structure that Vogler highlights:
they are steps on the way somewhere beyond themselves.
More work would of course be needed to work out fully the relationships
among these three levels—our conceptual framing of systems, actions and
reasons—and to investigate the sources of their hold on our thought. But I will
trust that readers will find these descriptions sufficiently familiar, and note that
whatever the details of the connections in place, there is at least this structural
similarity among them which suggests their fittedness for working together: they
all imagine their domain as structured by means-ends relations, and in
particular, a view of means-ends relations where the ends are the ultimate source
of value and justification: even if we accept that the ends do not always justify
the means, within this conceptual outlook, they are the only thing that could.
The centrality of ends in these pictures has another important consequence
and this is where even the differences among instrumentalist, Aristotelian and
Kantian accounts of rational action run out. In English, end has a double
meaning: an end can be a goal but it can also be a stopping point. These are, of
course, related: if I am engaging in an activity for the sake of some goal, then
when I realize that goal, I will also stop the activity. If I am futzing about in the
kitchen in order to bake a cake, then when the cake is done, I will stop. If I am
walking in order to get to the store, then I will stop walking when I get there. But
that means that once we think about something through the lens of means and
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ends, we also are conceiving it as something that has a kind of temporal
boundedness to it: as something that at least aims at a stopping point.
Here, then, is the crux of the problem. Sustainability is a property of
activities, processes and systems insofar as they are ongoing. And so if our basic
conceptual toolbox for thinking about such phenomena describes and analyzes
them in terms of means-end relations and thus as aiming at a stopping point, it is
not surprising that we will tend to overlook the value of sustainability. For
instance, we will not appreciate that there is a difference between a system that is
sustainable and a similar one that produces the same outputs with the same
inputs and yet is not sustainable. And this brings me to the suggestion I began
with: that we have trouble thinking well about sustainability because so many of
our conceptual resources for thinking about things that might be sustainable or
not lead us to conceive of them at least implicitly as processes that are enddirected and thus aim to come to a stopping point.
Some tools for bringing sustainability into view
If this diagnosis is right, then bringing the value of sustainability into view is
going to require a different set of conceptual tools that allow us to think well
about processes that are ongoing, and this will require thinking about processes
that are not end-directed and thinking about their value not in terms of their
ends.
First, it helps to bring a set of ongoing processes into view, and then see if we
can think about them without reverting to fitting them into a means-end
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structure. Note that a process or activity can be ongoing without being eternal; it
only needs to lack any internally dictated stopping point because it is not
directed at an end. Consider then the following examples:
• Casual conversations
• The unorganized play of children
• Marriages, friendships and many forms of informal human relationships
• Contemplation, in the Aristotelian sense of reflexive attention to the world
around us
• Human life on this planet
Although all five are meant to be cases where it is easier to see that they are
ongoing, my point here is not only that some activities are like this and others are
productive. Rather, our ability to see an activity as one or the other may depend
on whether we have the conceptual resources to do so. And so while I will
below lay out some of the resources that help us to see these activities as ongoing
and understand the importance of this fact for the kind of activities they are, it is
worth noting that we can analyze all of the examples above as end-directed
activities or collections of such activities and thus either ignore or downplay the
fact that they are capable of being done in an ongoing way. In fact, much
analysis of these activities involves doing just that. We can see causal
conversations as complexly interwoven attempts to inform and persuade and
amuse, each part of which aims at an end. We can see the play of children as the
playing of games and ask about the rules and aims and object and winners and
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losers, or treat it as a kind of developmental activity aimed at producing social
skills or identities. We can understand contemplation on the model of research,
as the search for understanding or knowledge. And we can understand human
life on the planet as a set of interlocking end-directed activities that don’t add up
to a whole different from the sum of its parts.
If, however, we are to develop a different conceptual frame for thinking about
such cases, then it helps to notice that though at least the first four all come to a
close, that is not because they are finished in the sense that they have
accomplished a goal or end. The conversation may wind down because we have
run out of things to say or one of us is pulled away or the hour is late. The play
ends when the bell rings or someone is called to dinner or a fight breaks out.
Contemplation is hard work, and so we tire or become easily distracted and so
break off. Nevertheless, in each case, while engaged in the activity, nothing
internal necessarily leads it to one of these outcomes. We mark this fact in
ordinary language by saying that they can be resumed after interruption without
this being a matter of their being done again. Baking a cake ends when the cake
is done, and I can bake another cake later, but I cannot resume baking this one
(as I can if I get interrupted at certain points along the way). In contrast, though
we can start a new conversation, we can also pick up the one we broke off last
night or, indeed, many years before, and it is one of the great joys of seeing old
friends when you find that you can pick up where you left off, even if you have
not seen each other in years.
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Some of these activities involve the pursuit of ends, but these ends are not the
ends of the activity as such: they are rather connected to intermediate aims or
best thought of as by-products. So in the course of our conversation, I may strive
to make myself understood, which is to set myself an end, but if I am conversing
with you and not merely explaining myself, once you have grasped my meaning,
we won’t be done talking. And while conversation has its pleasures and fosters
intimacy and may be a reliable way of spreading information, these do not
constitute its end. To see this, note that success at producing these results would
not give us a reason to stop our conversation. If anything, it would be a reason
to keep going.
The two points above suggest that these activities are going to have a very
different structure than end-directed activities do, and so we are not likely to see
them clearly if we bring to bear the concepts we use to make sense of enddirected activities. Moreover, once we attempt to take them on their own terms,
it is clear that though they do not aim at the production of goods or the
realization of ends, they may nevertheless realize values, and though they are
not justified by their ends, they are nevertheless activities we have reasons to
perform, often precisely because doing so realizes some set of values.
To have a way of distinguishing the relation between a productive activity
and its end and an ongoing activity and the values it realizes, I will say that these
values may provide a point to the activity. The point of an activity is one way to
answer the question of why engage in it that does not require invoking
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production of an end. If this seems like a merely verbal quibble, then note that
there are activities we engage in where it would defeat the point of doing them to
adopt the point as our end. Some of these are cases where the point is not
something we can bring about by aiming at it, like having fun, or making friends.
Others are cases where what we seek is that something comes to us or that we
call forth a certain response. In these cases, to adopt the response as our end is to
turn our activity into a form of manipulation rather than a kind of invitation, and
that change fundamentally transforms the nature of the action. The artist hopes
her artwork calls forth a certain response in her audience, but if she creates the
work with the end of provoking that response, she will produce propaganda and
not art. The lover, in declaring his love, wishes to call forth a declaration or an
act of love from his beloved, but if he makes the production of that declaration or
act his end, then his declaration will be a piece of seduction, not a genuine
declaration of love.9
Activities that have points rather than ends will still be governed by norms,
and those norms will be tied to their points, but not in the way that norms are
derived from ends. Activities have the points they do in virtue of the kind of
activities they are, rather than what they produce. By paying attention to the
structure that makes them the activities they are, we can work out what might be
I have been helped in thiking about how speech might call for a response without aiming at it by
Stanley Cavell, "Passionate Utterances," in Contending with Stanley Cavell, ed. Russell Goodman, 17798 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). I discuss these matters at greater length, in Reasoning,
94-101.
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called characteristic or constitutive norms of those activities.10 We do so by
working out what is necessary for an action or activity or process to be what it is
and not a close neighbor: when does the speech of the lover become the speech
of the seducer? When does conversation become lecturing? And one way to
know whether an activity has morphed into another will be whether it continues
to have the same point.
The point of working out some of this material is to show what thinking
about ongoing activities might look like if it does not resort to the structure of
means-end thinking that makes it harder to appreciate the ongoing qualities of
such activities. I come back to these points in the final part of the paper when I
turn to asking how we might think about our relation to values within a
conceptual framework that makes proper room for sustainability.
First, however, it is worth noticing that once we have a way of thinking about
ongoing processes on their own terms, we can more easily raise questions about
sustainability. Processes that are ongoing but not necessarily eternal will require
some sort of effort to sustain them. Since they have no goal-determined
termination point, they can be sustained, and since they are not necessarily
eternal, they need to be sustained. Thus, insofar as these processes and activities
have a point, realize some value, then there will be value in sustaining them and
thus one question we can easily ask about how we participate in such activities,
For an example of this kind of analysis, with regard to activities of reasoning, see Reasoning, 105199.
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systems and processes is whether we do so in a way that contributes to their
sustainability or destroys it. And it is very likely to turn out that among the
things it means to engage in these activities well is to engage them in ways that
sustains them. Think, for instance, of what makes a good friend or a good
conversationalist. It is in large part the way they sustain the relationship or the
conversation. Thus, sustainability will now play something like the role growth
plays with regard to productive processes: a kind of master value or virtue, a
measure or sign of it being done well.
Once again, the point here is not to situate sustainability and growth as
competing goals or values. Some ongoing processes may also involve growth,
though that growth will need to be sustainable if the process is to keep going.
What would be different such activities is that the relation between the value of
growth and the value of sustainability would shift when we are conceiving of the
system we are thinking about as ongoing rather than end-directed.
Responding to value in ongoing systems
Having brought the value of sustainability into view, I want to wind up by
suggesting that once we have the resources to think about ongoing systems on
their own terms, a new picture of the relation of action to value also presents
itself. To see this, we need to return to a feature of end-directed systems and the
conceptual frames well-suited to thinking about them.
Imagining an action, process or system as temporally bounded because enddirected also generally involves thinking of it as having a starting point. It leads
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us, that is, to thinking episodically: to treat various temporally extended
phenomena as nevertheless bounded: as episodes. We thus picture actions as
both starting and stopping, and are struck by human agency as the power of
beginning, or initiating various sequences of events.11 So pictured, a central
question to ask about human action is: what gets it going? And then there are
roughly two types of answers: we are pushed from within or we are pulled from
without. To explain action in terms of pushes is to point to psychological
features like desires or intentions. To explain action in terms of pulls is to point
to features of the world that call for or otherwise demand or entice action. In
either case, we can raise human agency above the level of merely causal pushes
and pulls by describing it as the capacity to set ends, and tying it to something
like reason or the will. Note that setting ends is here something that we do in an
important sense ab initio: even if we recognize that we set ends embedded in and
influenced by all sorts of contexts, there is still the idea of a new beginning in the
setting of an end or the performing of an action.
This can make the demands of some forms of morality seem mysterious, even
magical. Take, for example, this anecdote, related by Akeel Bilgrami, in a
discussion of Gandhi’s moral philosophy and his claim that Gandhi develops a
morality of exemplarity rather than a morality of criticism. As a boy, Bilgrami
and his father came across a wallet lying in the road on a walk together.
Though this thought pervades western philosophical thinking about human agency, it is brought to
great clarity and force by Arendt, who takes it to be a kind of moral of The Human Condition (Chicago:
University of Chicacgo Press, 1958).
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Bilgrami’s father asks why they should not pick up the wallet and when he does
not get the answer he is looking for, declares, “if we do not pick it up, then no
one will.” Bilgrami says of this morality: “The romance in this morality is
radiant. Somehow, goodness, good acts, enter the world and affect everyone
else. To ask exactly how they do that is to be vulgar, to spoil the romance.
Goodness is a sort of mysterious contagion.”12
Notice, however, that Bilgrami’s father’s pronouncement and Bilgrami’s
analysis take the decision to pick up the wallet or not as a starting point, as if the
world begins with this tableau: a wallet lying on the sidewalk as a father and son
walk up to it. The romance in the moral vision is the thought that this is not an
isolated, bounded episode, but that it will set a world in motion. But standing
behind that romance is the assumption that the world begins here anew.
Why does this matter? It turns out that how we think about values and our
relation to them changes in interesting ways when we think of ourselves not as
actors in a series of episodes but as participants in ongoing phenomena. In
particular, our understanding of our placement in the world changes if we keep
in mind what has already happened, how we got to this point. To see yourself as
a participant in an ongoing process is to put yourself in a position to recognize
that that process has already been sustained and thus that insofar as the process
has or realizes value, that you have benefitted from it, and that you may thus be
Akeel Bilgrami, Secularism, Identity and Enchantment, 114. Kantians will no doubt object to this
anecdote as perverting a Kantian ideal of universalization into a mysterious causal claim. But I think
there is something similarly tricky about the idea of adopting a maxim as an act of legislation.
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called on to do what is necessary to sustain it going forward. The picture we
need, then, is not of an agent standing still at the edge of a deliberative field and
charting out a course to start moving. Rather, we should think of an agent
already moving within a current, who needs to learn to steer among its ebbs and
flows. Even this image is insufficient, as it leaves out the effects that our course
going forward has on the currents’ strength and direction.
Let me begin to tease out the implications of this thought by returning to
Bilgrami, his father and the wallet. One might transpose his father’s thought into
a different temporal context: from the beginning of an episode to within an
ongoing process. Doing so, the thought becomes not “If we don’t pick it up, no
one will” but “Since no one else has picked it up, neither should we.” So put, it
loses its radiance and also perhaps its romance. Goodness is no longer a
mysterious contagion I unleash upon the world, but a tradition I sustain by
participating in it.13
This points to a rather different way of thinking about value and our response
to it. At least some values are realized by certain ongoing processes and
activities. My use of “realized” here is meant to contrast with being produced.
The idea is that a value is made real or manifest, brought into being, in the course
of the unfolding of the given activity or process, but this does not involve
something being produced by being aimed at. Not all such ongoing activities
Though I have used Bilgrami’s example as a foil here, I suspect that there is a fruitful way to bring
the two perspectives together. In particular, both Bilgrami’s realism and my analysis of ongoing
processes involve the idea that value is a feature of our being embedded within something larger
than ourselves and our episodes of action.
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realize values or the same values, and so we need to ask, when thinking about
such processes what, if any, values they realize. To see a practice or process or
system as realizing a value is just to see it as having a claim on continuing, being
worth sustaining. So when we conclude that some practice or system or process
realizes a given value, this then places a demand on its participants to act in
ways that sustain it. As far as I can see, thinking about value this way does not
require settling the metaphysical question of “where” values are to be found.
Some values are realized through human practices, others through practices that
involve humans but are not artificial human creations, and some values will be
realized through processes that don’t involve humans at all. Since they need not
set us in motion but only give us reason to keep moving, there is less of a need to
determine whether they are pushes or pulls, in the same way there is less reason
to worry about whether the eddy in the current is pushing or pulling me once I
understand where it is moving me and what I need to do in response.
Perhaps more importantly, from the point of view of a participant in an
ongoing process that she recognizes and thinks about as ongoing and worth
continuing, the demands placed on her are not sui generis. They are more like the
demands of gratitude. That is, once I see the practice that I find myself in as
ongoing and value-realizing, then I am led to appreciate the contributions to its
sustenance that have come before, and how I have benefitted from them: they
stand towards me as a gift, and like any other gift, they place a certain demand
on me: that I show gratitude in part by responding in kind. Recognizing the
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value of a world in which people do not pick up others’ lost wallets and take
them for their own, and recognizing the gifts others make me in making this
world such a place by not picking up the wallet, I show my gratitude for that gift
by reciprocating and also not picking up the wallet: by, as it were, also bearing
the costs necessary to sustain such a world.14
Before turning back to the question of climate change, let me flag a couple of
points of interest that arise within this way of thinking about value in the course
of ongoing activities. First, recognizing myself as the beneficiary of gifts is to
recognize my own dependence and thus vulnerability. This changes the way I
am likely to respond to the vulnerability of others and to the need on my part
and others for the kinds of conditions that make vulnerability bearable. I have in
mind here things like trustworthiness and forms of security that are not
understood as the absence of vulnerability and dependence.
Second, the normativity that is operative within this picture is not the
normativity of law and command, or even of the peremptory demand that
appears to be at work in Bilgrami’s realism. It is also not the subjectivist
normativity of desires or even that which follows the instrumental logic of endsetting. It is, rather, the normativity that involves calling forth a response.15
Moreover, because the response called for is one of reciprocity, the response itself
This is a lesson I have learned from James Tully’s remarks on what he calls the gift-gratitudereciprocity cycle in “A View of Transformative Reconciliation: Strange Multiplicity and the Spirit of
Haida Gwaii at 20,” the keynote address given at the “Indigenous Studies and Anti-Imperial Critique”
symposium, Yale University, Oct. 1-2, 2015. See also, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
(Canada: Milkweed Editions, 2013).
15 In Reasoning, I describe this as the “authority of connection.” See also, Cavell, “Passionate
Utterance.”
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must similarly call forth a response. Part of developing a better set of conceptual
tools for thinking about ongoing processes would involve developing a better
account of this kind of normativity, one that would allow us not only to
understand how it plays out in human relationships but also perhaps in our
relations with the non-human world. What goes on when some natural
phenomenon or process calls for my response, and how can I respond in a way
that calls forth its response in a way that is not merely causal? Do we have
examples of such interaction that are not merely mysteriously romantic?
Perhaps they provide us with a conceptual model for thinking about climate
change.
Climate change as a problem of sustainability
I have suggested that among the kinds of problems climate change poses for
us are philosophical problems, and among those problems is one having to do
with our difficulty in grasping the value of sustainability because of the unfitness
of many of our conceptual tools for making sense of ongoing processes and
systems. In response to that diagnosis, I then tried to sketch out some new
resources that might be better suited to making sense of the role and demands of
sustainability within ongoing processes. Can we now return to climate change to
see what difference this might make?
A great deal of the popular and political discourse around climate change
casts it as a problem we face as if we are setting out on a new episode of history:
we face a set of established facts and now the question is what to do about them.
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Sustainable practices thus become one tactic in our arsenal for reducing
emissions and limiting the damage already done and thus the catastrophic effects
on our future. And given that they involve costs and sacrifices, and that we are
unsure how much they will contribute and what other technological fixes might
be on the way, it is perhaps no wonder that many of us find ourselves
insufficiently motivated to adopt this approach.
But, armed with the skeletal conceptual resources developed above, we can
change that picture. Human (and non-human) life on the planet is an ongoing
process that continues only because it has been sustained in the past. We find
ourselves here due to the efforts of others in contributing to a system that has at
least continued to this point. The changing global climate is not a new problem
but a feature of an ongoing system that is no longer being sustained in the form
in which it has been ongoing for billions of years. It is a system on which we are
dependent and which we ought to regard as a gift. Seen in this light, a failure to
continue to sustain it is to show ingratitude to those who have sustained it until
now. It is to squander their gift. In contrast, the adoption of practices that would
return the global system to a sustainable footing are not a matter of altruism or
long term prudence or heroic sacrifice: they are merely the acts of reciprocal
gratitude to which we are called.
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