PROCESS ECOLOGICAL ETHICS
 (continued)

Introduction

The Process Relational Metaphysical Vision

The Passage to Ethics

Some General Features of Process Ecological Ethics


Implementing the Process Vision

There are two issues to be dealt with.  Firstly, can process ways of 
thinking give any guidance to concrete decision making processes?  
Secondly, how if at all can we stop process thinking in ecology from 
being just another elite discourse?



Decision procedures?

In answer to the first question and as a first try, our Process Ethics 
group came up with a five-step procedure.  As it happened, the 
inspiration for the procedure was a meditation on how we went about 
choosing the wines for the enjoyment of participants at the May 1997 
conference of the Australasian Association for Process Thought.  The 
procedure went as follows:

1. Access the situation as broadly and as deeply as possible.  This step is 
pretty obvious.  Process thinking just adds: the relevant situation 
consists in all living creatures affected taken in their total context, with 
human beings in their concrete social reality as one player.

2. Decide on what outcomes are excluded, deciding on the non-
negotiables, what is beyond the pale.  This was quite easy in the bottle 
shop.

3. Within the scope of what remains, consider together how best to 
enhance the harmony and intensity of experience of all creatures 
involved, the best integration of unity and variety, the total thriving in a 
rich environment.  We are interacting parts of the total natural process.  
How can we responsibly, artistically, most creatively participate?

4. Check what we come up with in stage 3 against 2 and 1.

5. Collective communal decision, the working towards a communal 
reflective equilibrium, leading to implementation, which will constitute a 
new situation, which may stimulate a further run through the procedure.

In our process, we make use of whatever knowledges there are at our 
disposal, but striving always to avoid what Whitehead calls the fallacy 
of misplaced concreteness, which is to say, confusing abstract models, 
e.g. from some economic think-tank, with the total concrete reality.

One interesting thing about this model is that it patterns a typical 
process event.  Step 1 = Reception, Steps 2 through 4 = 
Transformation, Step 5 = Transmission.  Or, Steps 1 through 4 = 
creatively taking into account our total past environment, and Step 5 = 
giving ourselves in ways to be taken into account by the future of that 
environment.  To complete the pattern: the Lure of Goodness, Truth 
and Beauty functions as Principle of Limitation in Step 2 and as 
Principle of Possibility and Novelty in Step 3.  We think of ourselves in 
our environmental concern as a process that makes a creative, 
responsible input into the total process under the Lure of the Divine 
Mystery, or something like that.

It didn't take us long to realize that our procedure was a bit naïve.  
Everything depends on who does it.  Process ecological ethics can't be 
just applying principles or balancing value.  It has to do as well with 
character transformation, with what kinds of individuals and 
communities and nations we are, with ingrained changes in the way we 
operate.  Everything is a more or less creative taking into account etc., 
but everything depends on the how and the how depends on the who, 
the character, the style of the how, which is to say, with ecological 
virtue.  This lead in our group to a kind of definition of Process Ethics:
Process Ethics = striving to intervene in our own process, individual 
and communal and national and international, and to embed the 
consequences in habitual ways of behaving, in habitual ways for that 
process to go, lured on by ideals which themselves keep moving.

In other words, we moved from ecological consequentialism with some 
touches of deontology (cf. Step 2 above) to a process ecological virtue 
ethic.  (Compare also Plumwood 1993.)



Just another elite discourse?

If we are as individuals and as a nation to take back control of our lives, 
subordinating economy to community and making the human 
community into a creatively interacting part of the total Australian and 
eventually total earth environment, our process ethic can't be just 
another elite discourse.  In the present context in Australian politics we 
could regard this as responding to the John Howard critique.

There are at least two forces to align with.  

Firstly, as the Melbourne-based process-aligned Aaron Gare has noted 
(Gare  1995, concluding chapter), among the forces capable of 
competing at the moment with the supremely totalizing force of 
globalizing free market economics are various forms of nationalism and 
regionalism and localization.  It makes sense therefore to align 
ourselves with them: think locally, act globally.  There is certainly a 
point here.  Lots of people who never think of themselves as Greenies 
still do lots of recycling.  People do worry about the pollution of their 
locality even where they might claim not to worry about pollution as 
such.  Pauline Hanson has shown us something at least, but how to 
rescue it from the xenophobia? The bottom line here is, start with 
people where they are, with what they care for.

Secondly, as has been demonstrated graphically in the recent debate 
about Wik, the religions are still with us.  

It is at this point that this mainly philosophical paper joins strongly with 
the theme of this Consultation on Religion and the Environment.  
Religions are still effective in the business of consciousness raising 
when every other force seems to fail.  Religions are in the business of 
personal and communal character formation via various forms of 
transformative practice, including prayer and meditative techniques as 
well as rituals and narrative-based structures of various kinds.  Modern 
Western philosophy is not much good at this.  Religions do continue to 
serve to broaden concern, to all the human and beyond the human, to 
minimise the confining and limiting influence of ego, to improve the 
element of transformative creativity, to open us to the immanent and 
transformative resources in the total process.  Whatever else they do, 
religions can well serve to focus for us the power of the Lure to 
Goodness, Truth, Beauty, Harmony and Peace.  

Here, process thinking seems to be on a winner, in so far as it has 
already a solid and well developed theological wing across Christian 
denominations, and an excellent record in cross-religions dialogue, 
especially with Japanese and to a lesser extent Chinese Buddhism.  
Indeed, this is much more solidly developed than its more recent 
ecological wing, though rather easy to integrate as the example of John 
Cobb in particular makes very clear.