Sustainable Development Meets Moral Development:
Moral Agency and Environmentalist Argumentation
in An Inconvenient Truth and The Earth Charter

Available only in Adobe Acrobat Version

Kevin J. O’Brien
Pacific Lutheran University

Draft only: please do not cite without permission

Introduction 

Those of us in this room likely need to no introduction to the realities of environmental degradation or the disturbing suggestion that its scale and seriousness make it an unprecedented global crisis.  However, it is worth reminding ourselves about the impact of industrialized human life on the planet with a few statistics: No ecosystem on Earth is free from pervasive human influence, and approximately 50% of the planet’s land surface has been fundamentally transformed by human activity.  Levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide have risen exponentially since 1800, closely matching a series of drastic increases in average global temperatures.  As many as one quarter of the Earth’s bird species have been driven extinct by human beings, and other species are going extinct at up to 1000 times the rate they would without our influence.  Furthermore, no human life is free from the pollution and scarcity created by industrialized life.  Worldwide, the average human body contains at least trace amounts of 700 distinct, manufactured chemicals classified as toxic.1

This paper is part of an attempt to reflect on how we as scholars of religion and human social structures can respond to these facts.  More specifically, I am exploring how my own scholarship relates to environmentalism, the global movement working to understand, mitigate, and reverse the disturbing trends of degradation.  In service to this goal, I will investigate two environmentalist texts: the Earth Charter, an international statement of principles and goals around environmental and social issues, and An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary film about global climate change featuring former Vice President Al Gore.  Both of these texts make powerful and persuasive environmentalist arguments; my project here is to see what a scholarly analysis reveals about them and what that teaches us about how scholars can contribute to the broader project of environmentalism.

I will investigate these texts through the social scientific study of moral development.  This will help me attend to how they make their arguments, what they assume about their audiences, and what is cognitively required to agree with them.  An Inconvenient Truth, I will show, meets viewers where they are developmentally, attempting to convince them to mitigate global climate change based on moral reasoning easily acceptable to a wide audience.  The Earth Charter, by contrast, introduces its readers to very difficult ideas, expecting and encouraging sophisticated, universalist morality.  This leads me to conclude with a question that emerges from comparing of these two texts:  are the goals of environmentalism broadly comprehensible to most people, or do they require sophisticated and complicated moral thinking?  Said another way, do we —as a community, a culture, a species— understand what it will take to respond to environmental degradation, or do we need to learn new ways of conceptualizing the problem? In the rather less precise language of my title: does sustainable development require moral development?  That is the question I aim to articulate in this paper. 

First, however, I want to make the inevitable but important disclaimers about how much I am not covering here.  I am working to bring a broad discourse of social science into dialogue with two complicated environmentalist texts, and obviously must ignore nuances, critiques, and alternatives to all of these.  The Earth Charter is as much a living and evolving movement as it is the document I will analyze, just as An Inconvenient Truth has predecessors and successors and a wide movement developing around it.  However, for purposes of this paper I will discuss only the text of the Charter and the content of the film.  Similarly, I am very aware that libraries have been written about moral development, including important critiques of this literature and its Western bias, the connections it assumes between attitudes and action, and its empirical limitations.  For purposes of this paper, however, I will assume that it is valid to think of human morality as a cognitive process that matures, drawing exclusively on the work of Lawrence Kohlberg and his best-known collaborator and critic, Carol Gilligan.  A more comprehensive approach to my topic would explore the nuances and critiques of this literature, and would also bring in ideas about moral development from outside the social sciences.2

Although I lack the time to develop all these avenues of investigation, I hope to show that what I can accomplish is worthwhile:  comparing two environmentalist texts by paying particular attention to the assumptions and expectations they bring about the moral development of their audiences.