Nature - autonomous learning

de-naturalisation 169The moral implications of this cognitive move are considerable. First,they take us away from moral naturalism, which is the belief that natureoffers us moral lessons that we ought to obey (see Box 3.3). Moralnaturalism can be very authoritarian. It can close down discussion aboutappropriate moral behaviour by trying to ‘read off’ an ethical code fromthe supposed ‘facts of nature’. From the perspective of geographers whosee nature as a social construction in degree or kind, moral naturalism isdisingenuous. It conceals a situation where one or other person’s moralityis being surreptitiously promoted by attributing that morality to a realmthat is either non-human or else a part of ‘human nature’ that is supposedlyunalterable and given. For instance, it was once common in Westerncountries to hear the refrain that women are ‘naturally’ caring, emotionaland nurturing, while men are naturally rational and analytical.The morallesson drawn from these two natural ‘facts’ about men and women wasthat the latter should stay at home to raise children, while the former shouldbe breadwinners.With the benefit of hindsight, we would now say thatthis morality does not reflect a natural state of affairs but, rather, the normsof patriarchal society where men were (and arguably still are) highlyfocused on controlling the life-chances of women.Second, the critique of moral naturalism implies that we should be morehonest about the social constructedness of all moral values. For socialconstructivists, a non-naturalistic morality is quite liberating. It showsus that what we deem to be morally good or bad, right or wrong, fair andunfair, is a societal choice, not something dictated to us by a putatively nonsocialnature. This means that those who, for whatever reason, opposedominant moral norms, should feel empowered to challenge them: to makea case for a different morality rather than appeal to some non-social realmas a source of values.Third, this does not mean that social constructivistgeographers do not care about those things that societies normally think ofas ‘natural’ (like otters or trees or the ozone layer).All it means is that mostof these geographers see moral values as deriving from society not nature.Thus, one can still be an ecocentrist adhering to a ‘green’ morality whilebeing a representational or material constructivist. But one would recognisethat this moral stance is not mandated by the non-human world butby a set of contingent values that happen to see that world as preciousand important.This said, it must be acknowledged that few geographershave set about developing an ecocentric morality, from within or withoutthe social-constructivist camp. I suspect that the reaction to moral