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Aristotle introduces our discussion in Posterior Analytics II.1 “There are four questions we can ask about the [natural] objects we know (epistametha): the fact (hoti); the reasoned fact or cause (dioti); the question about the modal existence of the entity (ei esti); and the question of definition or essence (ti esti).”¹ In the context of this chapter I’d contextualize this as ultimately searching for a definition of nature that can be the basis of our discussion. But “definition” is last on Aristotle’s list. Why is that? It is because the definition must be the result of experience (empeiria) that itself allows one to have confidence in his/her beliefs about what the fact actually is (hoti) and its structure and modalities within various contexts (ei esti) in order to speculate on the causal structure that underlies its operation (dioti). As has been the case in the past, this author is greatly influenced by Aristotle’s approach to understanding nature.² However, this chapter will use this general structure and move beyond the Stagirite’s exposition (though using this structure in Part I).

Primitive Posits. Nature is a term full of meanings.³ For our purposes here, let us begin with an understanding of nature in its contextual sense (the brute facts observed, hoti): we view nature as being outside us. But this does not mean that we, also, are not a part of nature (though some make this mistake in issues concerning the environment).⁴ There is an historical/religious tradition that views nature as outside of us just like children are outside of their parents but a part of the family. This is the tradition that talks about being “stewards of nature.” It goes back to the scala naturae.⁵ This model owes much to Aristotle’s notion of the three sorts of living enties (souls, psuche: plants, animals, and humans).⁶ In addition, we have two understandings of denotation: the individual and the group. It has been this author’s practice in the past to stipulate this distinction by the use of “small ‘n’” and “capital ‘N’.”⁷ Thus “nature” will refer to individuals and their capacities/executions while “Nature” will refer to larger groups—such as species, genera, et al. including integrated systems such as ecosystems, and more general systems such as biomes, biota, and the earth’s biosphere. By using language in this way, we can be more exact in our denotative referents (ei esti, above).

This sort of distinction helps a little in making clear the “inclusion problem” cited above: whether the individual looking around sees Nature as the other that does not include themself since they are an individual human and humans are exceptional in this scheme: residing at the top of the scale naturae. Though said human, let’s call her “Sue,” resides in Nature, her nature is as a power figure: on the Board of Directors for the corporation, Nature. Though she is nominally a part of the larger scheme, it is only as one of the ruling executives, trumped solely by God (if she is a theist) or by nothing else save the physical laws governing the interaction of states of matter (if she is an agnostic or atheist).

If this analysis is correct, then why is this so (dioti)? I have argued in a recent book that the European and Chinese traditions used the concept of Nature as the source of limitation on human excesses up until the seventeenth century in Europe and until the nineteenth century for the Chinese.⁸ Under this earlier account Nature was recognized as more powerful than humans—especially regarding violent killing events such as hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, tsunami, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions. In this way, an abstract Nature is seen as a force apart from living organisms (plants, animals, humans) and non-living entities (earth, air, water). This force was viewed by some as Divine.⁹

What occurred (once a general reverence for Nature is withdrawn, around the seventeenth century for Europeans) was that this particular collection of human civilizations replaced Nature with some other reverential object based upon human technological power—weapons using gunpowder and lead bullets along with improved naval vessels that could travel with large cargos for long distances. The new reverential object became colonial conquest (“discovering” and “civilizing” the “primitive world”) and then they expropriated riches from their aggressive land thievery. This made these empire builders believe that they were Masters of the Universe: Nature.¹⁰ They came, they saw, and they conquered. Then they destroyed the land configurations and substituted their own visions of majesty in its stead: constructing cities with brick buildings, roads, and monumental cathedrals that redefined the landscapes. This is what a Master of the Universe believes is in his job description.

Though for hundreds of years the magisterial attitude among Europeans and their thralls was supreme, there were a few architectural renegades such as Frank Lloyd Wright (1867−1959) who thought that organic approaches of fitting into the existing physical space rather than conquering it was a better goal.¹¹ This was also the goal of many conquered indigenous peoples who also often set out the organic in their architectural vision: fitting into the landscape rather than refashioning it in their own image. The standard European approach marks a transition by embracing a community worldview of dominion.¹²

In the worldview of dominion, the powerful individual (and by extension their cadre of helpers) rejects the perspective of the Natural community for that of a personal scope of control: This plot of land belongs to me. I own it. I may do whatever I want with it! This is the mantra. Such individuals think that they are entitled to shave down mountains, change the course of rivers, eliminate wetlands, pollute air and water, create new mountains (landfills with piled toxic waste)—all because they view nature as the other which they can own and do with it what they will. The dioti here is constructed around power to execute a personal, natural vision of what is.

Part of what is behind this worldview is what I’ve called the “egg carton” community worldview.¹³ Under this view, people wish to fulfill their nature by doing as they want without any interference from others (just like eggs in an egg carton are protected from touching any other egg in the carton). Such an aspirational vision is also thought to be possible as if we all were detachable units that can operate on our own apart from any interaction with other people or with Nature.

It is the contention of this author that such visions of personal human independence/autonomy are factually inaccurate concerning our existence on earth and are normatively false depictions of what we should aspire to individually as our nature. This is because we are intertwined with Nature—including the human community along with terrain, climate, plants, and animals. Our fates are not separate. The scala naturae model is the wrong way to think about our existence. In its stead we should consider a model of various community memberships in which we participate.

Living in Community. One important piece of the (hoti and ei esti) is to describe the manner of how it is we situate ourselves into communities. It has been this author’s contention that a better dioti than the exclusive, individualistic perspective of who we are and how we ought to understand the way forward is to jettison extreme individualism in favor of a worldview that accepts the concept of community. Under this account individuals live within community. There are constraints upon individuals both on how we should act (since purposive action defines the mode our human nature, ei esti)¹⁴ but our focus here is on the manner that individuals live in various communities: human communities (close at hand and extended throughout the world) and within Natural communities (close at hand and extended throughout the world). Like the individual perspective, the community perspective is normative and governed by imperatives for action.

A brief review of these various perspectives that set out their normative structure are as follows. First, the shared community worldview imperative (human communities: close at hand), “Each agent must contribute to a common body of knowledge that supports the creation of a shared community worldview (that is itself complete, coherent, and good) through which social institutions and their resulting policies might flourish within the constraints of the essential core commonly held values (ethics, aesthetics, and religion).” There are five important parts of this imperative that deserve attention. The first criterion is agent contribution. This means that members of a community have responsibilities to be active members. Ethically, one cannot completely shift this responsibility to others. Even in communities in which there are elected officials, this does not absolve each person in the community from periodically checking to see whether they think the community is doing what it says it’s doing and whether what it says it’s doing is proper policy. When it isn’t the case that what it says it’s doing is proper policy, then that member of the community has an obligation to engage whatever institutional mechanisms of protest and change are open to them.

The second criterion is the reference to the common body of knowledge. The common body of knowledge represents what is culturally accepted to be good, true, and beautiful about the world. Most of these understandings are non-moral in character. For example, music scales in the Middle East (that are based upon the tar and sitar) have tonal combinations that are different to those admired in Europe (based upon different source instruments). Each audience has been accustomed to their own musical sounds so that they appreciate the familiar combinations as beautiful. The reason that this concept is relevant here is that many communities (especially most macro communities) are diverse. In order to create acceptance within some community, it is necessary that, at a minimum, one recognizes the non-moral character of these differences. I call these non-moral differences legitimate cultural relativism.¹⁵ People should be as tolerant as possible about accepting these alternate forms of non-moral behavior (dynamics of dioti).

The case with moral relativism is more difficult. Moral relativism is a logical consequence of the moral anti-realists. These individuals contend that there is no science of the right and wrong in human action because there are no real moral objects at all.¹⁶ For the moral relativist all prescriptions about normative right or wrong are merely social constructions that have arbitrarily occurred via accidents in human history. Thus, when we say that “Action x is right in society y” we are only giving a factual, anthropological report. We are not saying anything universal about the human condition. This is because universal generalizations are the outputs of science only and describe things that really are (ontological objects). Since the moral anti-realists deny the efficacy of the moral realist scenario, it would be possible to give an anthropological report of murder and the shrinking of heads in some society and stop right there. No one in another anthropological tradition could call it wrong except as an expression of cultural imperialism. From this vantage point, global ethics would translate into merely an inevitable power play to impose the values of one culture over another. This results in ethical relativism.

The moral realists, on the other hand, point to natural criteria that can prove the existence of moral rules that govern humans—such as the prohibition against murder. These criteria can be based in group happiness (in the case of utilitarianism) or in absolute duty that is grounded in reason or the nature of human action (in the case of deontology). The swing theories (virtue ethics and ethical intuitionism) require direct connection to a source of what is (such as God or Truth) to validate the virtue or the intuition. Without this connection to such a source, virtue ethics and ethical intuitionism revert to anti-realism.¹⁷

Sometimes the moral and the non-moral become confused. In these situations, one must refer back to the personal worldview imperative¹⁸ and the relevant theory of ethics that have been embraced in order to separate an ethical from a non-ethical practice.¹⁹ It is easy to be prejudicial against what is new or unfamiliar. When the unfamiliar is merely different and non-ethical, then the common body of knowledge must expand to accommodate it (legitimate cultural relativism). When the unfamiliar is immoral, then the common body of knowledge should give direction for the proper way to exclude such an input to the community (for example, Charles Manson’s killing cult).

The third criterion describes common traits shared by the personal worldview imperative: complete, coherent, and connected to a theory of good (social/political philosophy). As per our embrace of the common body of knowledge, these pivotal criteria allow the members of the community to evaluate new members to the community so that they might be accepted or not. New doesn’t necessarily mean bad.

The fourth criterion enjoins that the creation of social institutions occurs within the guidelines set out by the imperative. The way communities act is via the creation of institutions that represent the worldview of the micro or macro group. It is important that the institutions that are so created actually represent the sense of the shared worldviews of the group’s members. It is certainly possible for an institution to be created that loses its original mission and strays in the way that it operates. When this occurs, it is the community’s responsibility to put the institution back on course (revise it or eliminate it).

Finally, the last part of the imperative is an acceptance of the diversity of the community in terms of core values: ethics, aesthetics, and religion. The acceptance of diversity is very important. This is because autonomy will necessitate that there will be no “standard or ‘normal’ citizen.” There is not an essentialist template by which we can measure. On the contrary, people are different. Embracing these differences and allowing institutional space for them is morally and practically important. There is a limit to this acceptance—not any core values will do only those consistent with the personal worldview imperative (as per criteria two and three mentioned earlier). The default position in the shared community worldview imperative is that diversity is prima facie good and a healthy state of affairs for the micro or macro community. The burden of proof to the contrary is upon those who believe that such behavior is unethical.

It is the position of this author that these five aspects of the shared community worldview imperative lay the groundwork for ethical human communities that operate effectively for all their members (hoti, dioti, ei esti).

Second, the complementary theoretical construct is an imaginative construction that extends community membership to those beyond the conventional boundaries of our micro and macro groups.²⁰ To intellectually grasp this aspect of community membership we need to import a new concept: the extended community. The extended community is one in which the agent is remotely connected. For example, I live in suburban Maryland just outside Washington, DC. I am a member of various micro communities (such as my college and various groups associated with my wife and children) and macro communities (such as my city, county, state, and nation). In each of these I have some direct or indirect contact that is proximate and tangible. I can go into the District of Columbia. I can write to my congressperson or senator. I can get into my car or travel via public transit directly to the physical domains of the state or national capital. Each of these is connected proximately to me through a tangible, operational, institutional structure that operates (in theory) under the principle of sovereignty set out above.

Now the extended community is a little different (hoti, dioti, ei esti). Even though I travel there by rail, sea, or air, I do not have immediate access. I must present a passport. I can be denied entrance. I have many fewer tangible institutional rights in the foreign country than I do at home. The foreign culture is different to my national culture. In some cases, I may be completely ignorant about its customs, government, and social circumstances. The media often makes it more difficult for me to find out facts on many foreign nations—particularly those that are poor and don’t seem to fit our perceived national interest. Because of these aspects of remoteness there may be a famine occurring in Mali or severe storm damage on one of the islands of Indonesia that many in the United States (for example) don’t even know about.

International ignorance is a large cause of international apathy. To address a background condition necessary for morality and global justice we must embrace a third sort of worldview imperative: the extended community worldview imperative:

Each agent must educate himself and others as much as they are able about the peoples of the world—their access to the basic goods of agency, their essential commonly held cultural values, and their governmental and institutional structures—in order that they might create a worldview that includes those of other nations so that individually and collectively the agent might accept the duties that ensue from those peoples’ legitimate rights claims, and to act accordingly within what is aspirationally possible.

The extended community worldview imperative (community extended throughout the world) has three principal parts. The first has to do with self and micro community education²¹ about the peoples of the world (hoti). This educational exercise should include important facts like geographical situation, political and institutional structures, and culture and how the people fare with respect to the basic goods of agency (see Chapter 3). This education process should be ongoing. The point is to allocate space in one’s consciousness and in the consciousness of those in your micro community to the existence and lives of others remote from you. Because this is an ethical imperative, obedience is not optional.

The second feature has to do with the way you incorporate others into your worldview (ei esti). Fulfilling this has to do with the operation of one’s imagination. The imagination is the power of the mind that makes real and integrates what is abstract into lived experience and vice versa. When one educates oneself about the lives of others, the imagination steps in and makes possible rational and emotional applications of the good will. Thus, one might possess enough (particularity via education and the imagination) that one could be able rationally to assess one’s duties in response to others’ valid rights claims. Also, one will be able to create fictive reconstructions of the people in these countries based upon intersubjective facts that one can create an extended style of sympathy. Normally sympathy requires two people in direct contact. In the extended variety, all that is needed is enough facts to generate an image of some typical person living in the country such that the vividness of their particularity will generate a constructed variety of the actual person-to-person contact of proximate sympathy. In this way, the rational and affective good will act together to exhort one to action on behalf of another.

The third feature refers to an action response (dioti). Those in other countries who have legitimate rights claims are entitled to our responding via our correlative duties. Ignorance of their plight does not absolve us from our responsibility. What often gets in the way is that we view those in the extended community as having their own society (that is viewed as the proximate provider of goods and services). Because our world is set up on the model of individual, sovereign states, it seems to many that each country should take care of its own. The community model offers some support to this analysis. However, in the end this sort of parochialism fails because the boundaries of states are not Natural facts but socially constructed conventions. Where one country ends and another begins is an artifact of history and military conquest. Since few of us (except the kraterists)²² believe that might confers normative goodness, this position should be rejected. The boundaries of states are artificial and do not indicate Natural divisions (even when the boundary between states is a mountain range or a river).

Thinking in this way is important because it shows that the way we parse ourselves (via geography, language, or culture) is rather arbitrary. There is a much stronger sense (based upon human biology) that our existence as Homo sapiens is the only real robust boundary that counts among our species.²³ However, there is much truth in the old adage “out of sight, out of mind.” When we are ignorant of the plight of others and when we haven’t undergone the imaginative connection of the other to ourselves, then it is certainly the case that we will be less likely to be moved to action.

The extended community worldview imperative exhorts us all to educate ourselves about the plight of others in the world and then to respond with individual and corporate action according to our abilities to act effectively. It must become a top priority issue to us all.

Third, when we add the other components of the Natural community, we come up with two more community worldview imperatives: the eco-community worldview imperative and the extended eco-community worldview imperative. Let us begin with the eco-community worldview imperative (the eco-community close at hand, hoti):

Each agent must educate themself about the proximate Natural world in which they live relating to their agency within this ecosystem: (a) what their natural place in this order is vis-à-vis their personal agency; (b) how their natural place (vis-à-vis their personal agency) may have changed in recent history; (c) how their social community’s activities have altered the constitution of the Natural order and how this has effected community agency; (d) the short-term and long-term effects of those changes vis-à-vis agency; and (e) what needs to be done to maintain the natural order in the short and long term so that the ecosystem might remain vibrant.²⁴

First, there is the requirement that people educate themselves as much as is practically possible about the proximate environment in which they live. This will require particular attention to the land, water, air, animal life, plant life, and meteorological events. In the age of the Internet, it should be possible for a large number of people on earth to obtain easy access to these facts.²⁵ What is important, of course, is that they connect to reputable scientific sources.

Second, is the personal recognition that individual humans live in interaction with their Natural surroundings and that they should contextualize such interactions personally.

Third, requires a sense of recent history of their local environment. This creates a personal baseline by which an individual might assess how they have been affected by climate change.

Fourth, and last is for the agent who has just assessed how they have been affected to examine various sustainability policy proposals and gather enough information so that they can decide which course they will endorse and then work vigorously for enactment of those policy proposals.

Just as when we focused upon the human community it was necessary to go beyond to the extended human community, so also it is the case with the eco-community. The extended eco-community worldview imperative is:

Each agent must educate themself about the world’s biomes: freshwater, saltwater, arid regions, forests, prairies and grasslands, tundra, and artic regions. This education should be ongoing and should include how the relative stability and Natural sustainability is faring at various points in time. This knowledge will entail a factual valuing that also leads to an aesthetic valuing. Since all people seek to protect what they value,²⁶ this extended community membership will ground a duty to protect the global biomes according to what is aspirationally possible.

This imperative prescribes first educating oneself about the scientific facts of the world. This doxastic responsibility is primary. Far too often people create beliefs that are unsupported by hard data.²⁷ This is irresponsible and immoral.²⁸ As the late US New York Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, is reputed to have said, “We are all entitled to our own opinions, but not to our own facts.”²⁹ What this means is that people must do their best to seek out reputable sources of scientific information on key extended environmental questions such as the CO₂ in the troposphere over discrete meteorological air spaces and the trends that follow from this.

Now it is probably the case that large numbers of individuals are deficient in science education so that they would not be able to engage at this level except for broad generalizations that might be skewed by news outlets (on traditional media or on social media). For these individuals I would suggest that they go to local libraries (in countries that have these public resources) and engage with the librarians on how they can educate themselves objectively on issues facing the scientific community’s assessment of how various perturbations are altering Nature.³⁰

A second normative duty is to transition from factual understanding to aesthetic valuing. It is my contention that this is a seamless process and the foundational grounding for an anthropocentric approach to environmental ethics.³¹ Understanding the operation of a complex biological system will result in an intellectual valuing of that system. To value a system is to undertake a duty to protect said system. Thus, the second part of the extended eco-community worldview imperative is to undergo this process. It all begins with education and it ends with an intellectual-cum-aesthetic appreciation that translates into a duty to protect.

In the end, the extended eco-community worldview imperative entails a duty to protect all of the world’s Natural biological and non-biological material systems (such as earth, air, and water) according to our resources. Since this duty extends only to humans, this account is anthropocentric. And though the shared community worldview imperatives (in their various forms) emphasize the communal duties incurred, still because human communities are comprised of many individual humans, these duties apply to each individual within the community via my personhood account, the personal worldview imperative.

This constitutes the definition of Nature within the context of community dynamics (ti esti).