Vito De Lucia
Bio
Vito De Lucia is currently Doctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of Law of the University of Tromsø, Norway. He is a founding member of Eco Pax Mundi Network. His main research interests are (theories of) ecological and climate justice, ecological legal theory/philosophy, legal history (roman and medieval), international environmental law and critical approaches to international law. He has been research associate of the Centro Internazionale per La Cultura e i Diritti dell'Uomo and has a master-level law degree from the University of Rome "La Sapienza". He also practices Taiji Juan (at the Norwegian Taiji Center), is a keen fly fisher, plays the blues and enjoys slow-ness.From Ethics to ethé
Ivan Illich has once aptly carved the difference between universal peace and people's peace. “War”, he argued, “tends to make cultures alike whereas peace is that condition under which each culture flowers in its own incomparable way. From this it follows that peace cannot be exported; it is inevitably corrupted by transfer; its attempted export means war”. Inspired by Illich's people's peace, I intend to draw the difference between the universal/izing Justice and Ethics of (neo-liberal) globalization, and the manifold justice(s) expressed by local ethé. Any articulation of justice which is abstracted from its nature-cultural context (that is, disembodied) has a disruptive, “belligerent” potential. Ethos on the other hand, through its fundamental linkages with place, and by way of articulating possibilities and proprieties of social and technical configurations, encompass both natures and cultures in particular ways. Different ethé map to different sets of dispositions and values, and by their localization, they also significantly express different relational engagements with particular ecologies. Traditionally localized ethé function mostly through ecological exchanges (with nature) rather than economic exchanges (with markets), which determines a necessary harmonization of cultural and ecological times and rhythms, in order to ensure uninterrupted flows of goods, materials, and energy from the surrounding ecosystems.
Furthermore, the global/izing dimension of mainstream, (neo-)liberal climate policy, enhances and accelerates that process of socio-ecological disembedding identified already by Polanyi as one of the crucial elements of the “great transformation” spawned by the rise of industrial capitalism. Carolyn Merchant described in details the same process of disembedding and enclosure occurring in England in “farm, fen and forest”. She described in particular the effects on the environment of the transition “from peasant control for the purpose of subsistence to capitalism control for the purpose of profit”. This transition proved instrumental to the emergence of a mechanistic view of nature, which ultimately provides the justification for the pillaging of nature/culture, time/space, for the purpose of capitalist accumulation. And this transition maps to a larger extent onto a transition from local justice(s)/ethé to universal/izing Justice/Ethics.
The conceptual transition from a Universal Ethics to local ethé entails also a (re-)consideration of a conceptual transition from Justice to equities. This may help (re-)aligning justice with people's natures and cultures. In this sense, it may be necessary to address the split – emerged in Plato – between justice and eipieikeia (equity). In Plato (Laws, Book VI) equity becomes the mitigating element of “people's justice”, and justice begins to assume a technical, legal, top-down character: "the idea of epieikeia drew the specific feature of classical culture opposing the universal nature of the Law with the historicity of actual facts and representing the tragic side of human behaviour on the ground of an unsolvable conflict between duties”. Now, eipieikeia, which means “mildness, gentleness, fairness“ is that which operates to constrain the disembedding trajectory of Law, re-locating, quite literally, justice in its contingent historicity: justice as equity.
For a fuller, though still preliminary, exploration of these ideas, you can see: De Lucia, V. (2008) What Climate Justice? A critical analysis, Paper prepared for the VI International Conference on Ethics and Environmental Policies: ETHICS AND CLIMATE CHANGE - Scenarios for Justice and Sustainability, Padova, 23-25 October 2008
Posts by Vito De Lucia
- More critical reflections on climate justice
- Climate justice and a critique of carbon trading
- Civil Society Declaration on Technology and Precaution at COP15 in Copenhagen
- The story of cap and trade
- Climate policies are devastating tribal people
- 350 reasons against carbon trading
- Termina sus sesiones la primera audiencia del Tribunal Etico Internacional de Justicia Climatica
- Newsletter Article from Eco Pax Mundi Kenya
