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Theology and Politics in Laudato Si’

Part of: The Pope’s Encyclical and Climate Change Policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Dale Jamieson
Dale Jamieson*
Affiliation:
Environmental Studies Department, Environmental Studies and Philosophy, Environmental Studies and Animal Studies, New York University
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Pope Francis has more epistemological and moral authority than any scientist, philosopher, lawyer, or politician. He has the second most popular twitter feed, and his messages are more likely to be retweeted than anyone else’s. The Pope has the power to order some and to persuade others. Most of all he has the power to affect the global agenda. When the Pope speaks, people listen.

Pope Francis commands respect for many reasons. He sits atop a hierarchy with which 1.2 billion people are affiliated. Organized more like a multinational corporation than a nation-state, the Catholic Church and its members are spread across all the countries of the world. But it is not just Catholics who take his pronouncements seriously. As a man of the South, occupying an office in the North, with no national allegiance except to a country of 110 acres with a population of 842, he is uniquely situated to speak out on global issues. Laudato Si’ also commands respect because it is an astonishingly well-written argument for a powerful point of view, one that in various bits and pieces can be found in the small journals and ignored books of environmental philosophy and theology.

Type
Symposium: The Pope’s Encyclical and Climate Change Policy
Information
AJIL Unbound , Volume 109 , 2015 , pp. 122 - 126
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of International Law 2015

References

1 Pope Francis, Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father Francis on Care for our Common Home, para. 21 (2015).

2 Id. at para. 34.

3 Id. at para. 116.

4 Id. at para. 48 (quoting Bolivian Bishops’ Conference, Pastoral Letter on the Environment and Human Development in Bolivia El Universo, don de Dios para la vida 17 (2012)).

5 Pope Francis, supra note 1, at para. 33.

6 Id. at para. 140.

7 Peter Singer (@PeterSinger), Twitter (June 19, 2015, 08:59 AM).

8 For more on this point see Henning, Brian, Stewardship and the Roots of the Ecological Crisis, in For Our Common Home: Process-Relational Responses to Laudato Si’ (Cobb, John B. Jr., & Castuera, Ignacio eds, 2015)Google Scholar.

9 Some biocentrists hold that it is individual living things that should be valued in themselves while others think that it is species. The Pope seems to think that it is both individuals and species that should be so valued. When we speak of species we may be speaking of all those individuals who are members of a species, or we may be referring to some something more abstract. If we use “species” in the former way, then biocentrism is the view that all living things should be valued in themselves. If we use “species” in the latter way, we may not have that view. For more on biocentrism see Dale Jamieson, Ethics and the Environment: An Introduction, Ch. 6 ( 2008).

10 See, e.g., Holmes Rolston III., Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World (1988). Rolston III embraces “ecocentrism” as well as biocentrism. For a discussion of ecocentrism, see Jamieson, supra note 9.

11 For a subjectivist metaethic coupled with an ecocentric outlook, see Robert Elliot, Faking Nature: The Ethics of Environ Mental Restoration (1977). Generally on metaethical views in environmental ethics see Jamieson, supra note 9, at Ch. 3.

12 Albert Schweitzer, Out of my Life and Thought 156 (2009).

13 Pope Francis, supra note 1, at para. 246.

14 John Rawls, Political Liberalism (1996)

15 World Commission on Environment and Development, Report of the World Commission on Environment and de Velopment: Our Common Future, Un Doc. A/42/427 (Mar. 20, 1987).

16 Pope Francis, supra note 1, at para. 165.

17 Id. at para. 50.

18 Id. at para. 14.