On July 28, 2022 the United Nations General Assembly declared that living in a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment is a human right. This volume explores and accounts for the primary vector of violence degrading this purported human right: environmental violence. Environmental violence is harm due to excess pollution put into the earth system through human activities and processes. Environmental violence is not the only mode of framing the myriad ills facing humanity and the planet, but as a tool it is designed to map, trace, and draw out the multitude of potential and realized pathways of harm from environmental hazards framed in the antecedent conditions and impact-mediating contexts that are integral parts of the whole of the violence facing humanity and the planet. The global metabolism for material and energy shows no signs of abating and the possibility of relying on decoupling consumption from material use and emissions shows no sign of materializing in a sufficient way to avoid ecological catastrophe. To drawdown emissions and regenerate biotic and abiotic communities are likely the orders of the day, and this volume proposes the environmental violence framework as a tool to help us get there.

Engaging in normative discussions about the characteristics and requirements of a good life in a good society, Political Philosophy has a long-standing history in identifying the economic, political and social requirements for turning waged work into a practice that contributes to human flourishing. Meanwhile, a widely shared scepticism towards meaningful work under capitalism is another powerful theme in the field, arguing that the alienating nature of waged work cannot be overcome. This chapter argues that contributions to meaningful work in the realm of Political Philosophy have a strong tendency to incorporate both positions, presenting an ambivalent understanding of wage labour as activity that is burdensome and alienating for the many and emancipatory and meaningful for the few. Discussing two of the most significant schools of thought in this field, virtue ethics and political materialist contributions, the chapter identifies and compares their ontological understandings of work and its nature under capitalism, the conceptualisation of labour agency and the guiding principles of meaningful work that they promote.

The New Natural Law Theory (NNLT) identifies the foundations of ethics in practical principles directing agents to aspects of human flourishing in an all-round reasonable manner. Other normative principles and concepts, including the concept of human rights, are understood in terms of their relationship to human flourishing, and the basic human goods that are constitutive aspects of that flourishing. NNLT thus possesses resources to explain the justification and importance of human rights, as well as the role rights talk plays in the overall economy of moral, political, and legal discourse. In this chapter, Section 2 discusses the logic of rights; Section 3 provides the general foundations for the justification of rights, both human and legal, in considerations of justice and common good. Section 4 looks at the paradigm case of human or natural rights: rights that are absolute and thus already conform to the logical structure of rights identified in Section 2. Section 5 identifies the scope of such rights as including all human beings. Section 6 addresses the relationship between human and legal rights. Finally, Section 7 addresses the metaphysical status of human rights.

This chapter outlines three positions on the desirability of a marriage of the natural law and natural rights traditions: (i) that natural law and natural rights may be united without any recourse to revelation; (ii) that natural law and natural rights may be united but only by recourse to revelation; and (iii) that any form of union between natural law and natural rights should be avoided as contrary to the common good and the well-being of the City of God. It is argued that the third position is the preferred on the grounds that the natural rights tradition is difficult to translate into a non-individualistic, communitarian framework. Social bonds and civic ties revolve primarily around mediating institutions such as the family and cultural, educational, and sports associations, not around the machinery of the state and abstract concepts. Unlike Bills of Rights that enumerate rights attached to individuals, the alternative Common Law tradition presupposes that human persons live in communities, that human life is relational, and that conflicts arise for adjudication when a clash of claims occur that need to be resolved with reference to some higher common good.

Trials, legal systems, governments, and market economies are all complex adaptive systems. Viewing them in that light opens up new avenues for research, and leads to a possibly unprovable supposition that human flourishing well be enhanced at the intersection of societies with a commitment to the rule of law that embrace free elections, market economies and responsive legal systems of which the common law is the paradigmatic example. These complex adaptive systems have the advantage of feedback mechanisms that may facilitate the intelligent exploitation of the vast amount of information contained in each of the systems.

This chapter analyses progressive property theory in more detail, assessing the membership of that school of thought, the range of perspectives on the mediation of property rights and social justice that it captures, and its core themes and traits. It also addresses the property values that are captured in progressive property's pluralistic approach. These include efficiency, autonomy, and personhood. In doing so, the chapter signposts ideas about the relationship between property rights and social justice that influence Irish constitutional property law, in order to assist the reader in understanding the immanent, evolving, and often partial influence of property theory in the doctrine and outcomes of Irish constitutional property doctrine that are analysed in subsequent chapters. These values can help to explain the intuitive approach that is identifiable in much judicial reasoning in constitutional property law.

This chapter examines certain connections between Karl Marx and the capabilities approach. It contains a brief discussion of Marx’s influence upon, and reception by, contemporary capability theorists. However, the chapter is primarily concerned with identifying, and reflecting on, certain formal and substantive affinities between Marx’s account of human flourishing and the capabilities approach. Those formal affinities include Marx’s ‘pluralistic’ account of value; his ‘normative individualism’; and his opposition to wholly ‘subjective’ accounts of advantage. Those substantive affinities include the overlap between certain modern accounts of ‘central capabilities’, and the extensive account of the necessary conditions of human flourishing that can be reconstructed from Marx’s writings. In addition to these questions of influence and affinity, the chapter considers whether his work might provide a critical perspective on some contemporary versions of the capabilities approach. Marx’s insistence on the value of fulfilling work and meaningful community, for instance, draws attention to particular capabilities that might be underestimated by others. More generally, Marx’s account of the threshold conditions of the good life suggests that, in pursuing the social and other changes that best promote human flourishing, we should not set our sights too low.

The Introduction challenges three limited approaches to ethical education, that is, the teaching of moral values as a subject matter, as the fostering of cognitive moral reasoning, or as the cultivation of virtues or character traits. We argue that ethics does not consist solely in informational propositional knowledge, but instead, it requires cultivating sensitivities that constitute caring in a relationship; ethics is rooted more deeply in the social and emotional aspects of human relationships than in the cognitive reasoning of moral principles, which will not awaken the need nor enliven the ability to appreciate the differences in others; ethics cannot be reduced to a list of virtues. We further argue that these three approaches are limited not only in their capacity to enable young people to overcome challenges in relationships with and feeling for others, but also in these being situated within an instrumentalised conception of education. This conception tends to ignore the importance of living human relationships within a school community as intrinsically valuable, hence missing out a core ingredient in ethics. To overcome these limitations, this book proposes that ethics should be understood primarily in terms of engaging with others in human relationships that consist in caring and mutual appreciation.

Political science does not offer a distinct subdiscipline to address the subject of energy. Insofar as political science has addressed energy, it has focused on issues often neglected by other disciplines, notably the role of geopolitics and international relations, and the domestic politics of resource-rich states. Apart from the different subfields, we examine different approaches including realism, constructivism, liberalism and Marxism. The rise and fall and rise again of academic articles on energy in leading political science journals is reviewed and linked to exogenous forces such as the price of oil. Two distinct energy topics which have received attention are nuclear power and the oil crises of 1973–79 because of their wider geopolitical ramifications. Perhaps the most prominent or consistent thread through studies of the politics of energy is the question of energy security or energy independence. Finally, in recent years, energy has increasingly emerged as a focus for study in environmental politics and climate change politics in particular.

This chapter sets out the contribution to ‘good energy policy’ that might be forthcoming from the (perhaps unfamiliar) field of ‘public theology’. It argues that an environmental public theology would commend a ‘grounded’ energy policy – one rooted in an explicit conception of a ‘good’ or ‘virtuous’ human life. After defining ‘public theology’, it identifies five convergent stances relevant to energy policy that seem to be emerging today among representative of most world religions: (i) nature as a ‘divine’ ordering marked by integration, equilibrium and harmony rather than as infinitely exploitable; (ii) a call for human ‘stewardship’ of nature; (iii) an acceptance of climate science and an urgent call to shift away from fossil fuels; (iv) scepticism towards unlimited economic growth and its attendant ‘consumerism’; (v) locating energy questions within a broader commitment to a just social order characterised by both an equitable global distribution of access to energy and a decentralisation of energy supply (‘environmental subsidiarity’).