Andrew Dobson

La ciudadanía, como concepto, trata de los derechos y los deberes de los individuos (normalmente), y en un territorio político determinado (por ejemplo, un Estado). Bajo su vertiente participativa, la ciudadanía está normalmente asociada con la esfera pública, y puede suponer o no el cultivo y ejercicio de ciertas virtudes. El diseño específico de la arquitectura general del concepto de ciudadanía nos define lo que podríamos llamar «ciudadanías adjetivas» -por ejemplo, la ciudadanía liberal, la ciudadanía republicana o la ciudadanía cosmopolita-. Cada uno de estos tipos de ciudadanía interpreta la arquitectura de diferente manera. Así, la ciudadanía liberal tiende a centrarse más en los derechos que en los deberes, la ciudadanía republicana habla en el lenguaje del deber y la virtud, y la ciudadanía cosmopolita cuestiona los argumentos territoriales de los otros dos tipos de ciudadanía. Este artículo explora el modo en que la ciudadanía ecológica completa la arquitectura general de la ciudadanía, antes de perfilar la importancia de la ciudadanía ecológica para el objetivo de lograr el desarrollo sostenible.

In this article the implications of our nature as both autonomous and heteronomous beings is discussed. It is suggested that our condition as part-dependent creatures calls for a reconsideration of the nature of both freedom and liberalism, and the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Jean-Paul Sartre is used to illustrate the natural and historical dimensions of our dependency. The conclusion reached is that neither deep ecological re-enchantment nor full-blooded cornucopianism are possible, and that we need to take our nature as semi-dependent creatures seriously as we seek ways of negotiating our way through our environmental problems.

Andrew Dobson charts Sartre's transformation from novelist and apolitical philosopher of existentialism, before the Second World War, to a committed defender of Marxism and Marxist method after it. Examining Sartre's post-war work in detail, he shows how the biographies of Baudelaire, Genet and Flaubert, often considered tangential to his main oeuvres, are in fact central to this defence of Marxism, and should therefore be read as acts of political commitment. Andrew Dobson's study of posthumous sources, including the extended commentaries in English of Volume II of the Critique of dialectical reason, and in its insistence on reading Sartre's philosophical development as primarily politically motivated. It provides a clear reading of some of Sartre's less familiar works, situating them in an overarching social and political project.

When God gave humankind dominion over the earth he may not have known exactly what we would be able to do with it. The technical capacities to which the production and reproduction of our everyday life have given rise have grown at an astonishing and, it seems, ever-increasing rate. The instruments that we use to do work on the world have become sharper and more refined, and the implications of human interventions in the nonhuman environment are much more far-reaching than could have been imagined even forty years ago. It has become something of a cliche to say that our technical abilities have outstripped the wisdom to know when, where, and how we should appropriately use them, but techniques such as genetic engineering invite the dusting-off of the cliche and the asking of the question implicit in it: We know we can splice genes, but should we splice them? We might of course come to the conclusion that we should only splice some of them some of the time, but even arriving at that conclusion presupposes that the ethical question has been asked and answered.

I consider the contribution that a biocentric perspective might make to the ethical debate concerning the practice of genetic engineering. I claim that genetic engineering itself raises novel ethical questions, and particularly so when confronted with biocentric sensibilities. I outline the nature of these questions and describe the biocentric basis for them. I suggest that fundamentalist opposition to projects of genetic engineering is unhelpful, but that biocentric claims should now be a feature of ethical consideration. I conclude, though, that while environmental ethicists can contribute powerfully to debates concerning the future of genetic engineering, the ultimate direction it takes is likely to be beyond their control.

This paper addresses the leitmotif of Alan Holland's work, which is argued here to be a defence of the existence and worth of nonhuman nature. Definitions of politics have always depended on the idea of nature as a contrasting non-political realm, usually turning on the centrality of speech. Referencing the work of Aristotle, Kant and Bentham, I suggest that the instability of the distinction between the human and the nonhuman means that politics, as ‘thing and activity', must itself be unstable. The question of whether there can be a politics without nature is explored through an analysis of the work of Latour, and the conclusion is reached that listening may well be just as important as speaking.