Cheryl Hall

What Will it Mean to be Green? Envisioning Positive Possibilities Without Dismissing Loss

Convinced of the importance of framing, many environmentalists have begun emphasizing positive visions of a happy and healthy green future rather than gloomy pictures of deprivation and sacrifice. ‘Gloom and doom’ discourses foster despair and resistance, they worry, instead of hope and motivation to change. While positive visions are crucial, though, it is ineffective to deny that living more sustainably will involve any loss. Since people value many incompatible things, living more sustainably will inevitably entail both sacrifice and reward. Environmentalists must help articulate new possibilities of a greener future without dismissing the value of what must be given up.

‘Passions and constraint’ The marginalization of passion in liberal political theory

Positive arguments on behalf of passion are scarce in liberal political theory. Rather, liberal theorists tend to push passion to the margins of their theories of politics, either by ignoring it or by explicitly arguing that passion poses a danger to politics and is best kept out of the public realm. The purpose of this essay is to criticize these marginalizations and to illustrate their roots in impoverished conceptions of passion. Using a richer conception of passion as the desire for an envisioned good, I argue that it is neither possible nor desirable to eliminate passion from politics. Passion should therefore be established as a central category of analysis in political theory alongside other key concerns.

Reason, Passion, and Politics in Rousseau

What role do passion and sentiment play in politics, according to Rousseau? In this article I demonstrate that for Rousseau certain kinds of passion are crucially important to a healthy political society. I argue that passion plays a key role even in the Social Contract, despite that works apparent turn toward the kind of dispassionate reason criticized in the Second Discourse. What is missing from the Social Contract is not political passion but rather the political education of passion.

The Habitual Route to Environmentally Friendly (or Unfriendly) Happiness

I agree with Andreou that people are ‘highly adaptable when it comes to material goods.’ But I would supplement her point about the influence of social comparisons on experiences of happiness with a point about the influence of habit. Andreou does briefly mention habituation, arguing that ‘a good will give one less happiness once one has gotten used to having it.’ While this may be true, though, it is also true that ones sense of how necessary a good is to ones happiness actually increases once one has gotten used to having it. One becomes accustomed to having that good in ones life, incorporating it into ones routines, such that it becomes difficult to imagine life without it anymore. This phenomenon complicates Andreous argument that being happy with less is possible if everyone has less: being happy with less also depends on (re)creating habits adapted to living with less.