Western modernity is characterized by instrumental relations between humans and nature, as well as between humans themselves, that have caused irreversible environmental and social exploitation and degradation. Many policy documents, such as those by the United Nations Environment Programme, warn of the uncertainty and unpredictability of our precarious conditions due to our social and ecological interrelations and interdependencies.
Accepting that our position in the world does not allow us secure knowledge of the consequences of politics, Reversibility – Politics under Conditions of Uncertainty asks how we can act politically in a responsible way when we cannot predict the outcomes of our decisions. Hartmut Behr diagnoses Western modernity and its manifold crises as dominated by the view that fellow humans and natural environments are merely means to our individual ends. Behr introduces a novel ethics of self-restraint and the principle of reversibility – a commitment to political actions whose effects shall not be indefinite or immutable – to build a policy framework that demands both ethical and practical reflection on the conditions of action and that accounts for the limitations under which we act and live.
Identifying an urgent need for re-thinking political progress and for policy reform, Reversibility – Politics under Conditions of Uncertainty presents a new understanding of the self and of political responsibility centred in a genuine acknowledgment of the human condition.
Authors
- Published in
- Montreal, CA
Table of Contents
- Cover 1
- REVERSIBILITY – POLITICS UNDER CONDITIONS OF UNCERTAINTY 2
- Title 4
- Copyright 5
- Dedication 6
- Contents 8
- Tables and Figures 10
- Preface 12
- Acknowledgements 18
- Introduction 24
- PART ONE: THE ETHICS OF REVERSIBILITY 42
- 1 Questioning Uncertainty and Contingency 44
- 2 Ontological and Epistemological Implications 55
- 3 Ethical Consequences 76
- 4 Self-Restraint: Reflections on a ‘Self’ 97
- PART TWO: THE POLITICS OF REVERSIBILITY 106
- 5 From Ethics to Action 108
- 6 The Triangulation of Perspectivity and Negation with Noesis 121
- 7 Contingency and Non-linearity 130
- 8 Grooving the Unknown, Three Conclusions, and Illustrations of Reversibility in Practice 139
- PART THREE: CONCEPTUAL AND PRACTICAL CONTRIBUTIONS OF REVERSIBILITY 150
- 9 Normative-Interpretivist and Rationalist Policy Analysis: The Significance of Context 152
- 10 Responding to the Anthropocene 174
- Conclusions: Reversibility and Creative Governance 186
- Notes 196
- Index 240
