Real Anthropocene Politics

This paper critically discusses the Anthropocene discourse by exploring parallels with the realism v moralism debate in political theory. Realism is the denial of ‘ethics first’ approaches to politics; a rejection of political philosophy conceived as a form of ‘applied ethics’. Different versions of realism are more or less plausible but I take the central insight to be correct: politics is not well-understood as simple conformity to a prior, independently defined moral standpoint. But this is something of a strawman. Realism overstates the extent to which ‘moralists’ define moral standpoints independently of politics and in so doing obscures the way ethics and politics may be intertwined without being reducible to each other. The Anthropocene discourse also properly emphasises something important: the degree of human impact on the earth makes it impossible to view nonhuman nature as a ‘prior’ source of normativity, values or principles fully independent of humanity. But this is something of a strawman too: by no means all ‘environmental ethics’ concerned with nature’s value has that view of nature, which was never plausible anyway. Like the ‘realist’ label in the context of the relation between ethics and politics the Anthropocene label obscures the intertwining of humanity and nonhumanity. The Anthropocene label is also vulnerable to ‘realist’ critique of the ideological ramifications of deploying such a homogenising and backgrounding frame without due regard to ‘by whom, to whom, for whom’ questions.