Introduction
As the pieces by Young (Chapter 4) and Fraser (Chapter 5) make clear, human beings are not isolated monads but like all entities (a freighted word, we understand) consist of relations with other entities (human, non-human, or both), and questions of injustice, oppression, and ethics ramify throughout those relations and the networks that support them. Young’s piece particularly offers a critical discussion of the notion of the individual rights-bearing citizen, and posits the relational nature of identity. To take this argument further, we also propose that moral knowledge is inextricable from embodied and geographically specific experience. To know something is wrong, especially in an ongoing structural sense, can be a matter of accruing experience and insight, and also a matter of communal, discursive intelligence, not necessarily abstracted reason. The remaining pieces in this section investigate the ways in which this is so.
David Smith (an Emeritus Professor of Geography at Queen Mary College of the University of London) elaborates upon this theme in his paper (Chapter 6). A key notion for Smith in this piece, as in much of his other work on geography, social justice, and ethics (see, e.g., 1973, 1977, 1994), is the notion of moral arbitrariness, here termed good fortune, and its implications for the allocation of life’s goods and bads. Smith adds a much-needed dimension to the importance of place and its multiple connections to morality, ethics, and justice, and also links back to an important element in Young’s paper (Chapter 4). In highlighting the arbitrariness of place (as both status and geographic location) of birth, Smith recalls Young’s argument about the assigned nature of group affiliation (and Heidegger’s notion of “thrownness”). Here Smith establishes for readers the idea that inequalities are primarily morally arbitrary. This means that by and large the production, distribution, and consumption of life’s benefits and burdens, including personal physical and mental attributes, are arbitrary with respect to the moral worth of the people involved. We can neither take credit nor be blamed for the circumstances (places and positions) into which we are born, uneven as these circumstances may be. As Smith then argues, because people are neither morally worthy nor unworthy of life’s initial endowments, it is not equality that must be defended as both idea and practice, it is, rather, inequality.
Several fundamental issues are raised by this formulation by Smith of justice as equalization. First, and one which Smith deals with early on in the piece, is the pragmatic difference between equality and equalization; the former is clearly seen as the goal, impractical as it might be, the second as a process and a measure of progress (i.e.
moving toward equality rather than away from it is “possible and morally justifiable” for Smith).
A second issue is more complicated: What is to be equalized? Smith discusses several possibilities:
opportunity, primary goods, resources, capabilities, welfare outcomes? However this issue is decided, the choices Smith offers here reflect an understanding of justice as (equitable, or as equitable as possible) distribution. (He develops more elaborated notions of justice in his later works; see e.g. Smith, 2000; Lee and Smith, 2004.) This then leads Smith to a discussion of what it is that people require for life, and his search for commonalities across humankind. This formulation also seems to entail a hierarchy of needs (with basic subsistence needs to be met first) that flattens out both interpersonal, or intergroup, differences as well as the kinds of structured oppressions defined by Young. Smith’s call for equalization in distribution (of whatever finally constitutes measurable dimensions of justice) leaves aside the calls by Young (to overcome such structured oppressions as cultural imperialism) or Fraser (for recognition). Unless, as suggested earlier, such matters as “parity of participation” and control over the decision processes that structure material distributions are included in the notion of distribution itself, Smith’s formulation leaves these matters unattended.
In the next part of his paper, Smith is concerned with the critical question of what makes “good geography,”
and in light of his conceptions of “the place of good fortune” and justice as equalization, it is not surprising that Smith defines research that helps to illuminate the former and to further the process of the latter as “good”
geography. What kinds of work does this entail? One illustrative example would point us to a fleshing out of the kind of model provided by Olwig. As Smith argues, “the justice and morality people actually practise, and the theories that ethicists devise, are embedded within specific sets of social and physical relationships manifest in geographical space, reflecting the particularity of place as well as time” (see pp. 102–3). This suggests, following Olwig’s general assessment of the morally important dimension of landscape (understood in its broad sense), that comparative assessments that illuminate the variety of conceptions of justice, ethics and morality, as practiced, might open new imaginaries and approaches to such issues. Smith also suggests that much empirical work
BOX 1: THE MANY MEANINGS OF LANDSCAPE: CONNECTING PLACE AND JUSTICE In his important 1996 article, “Recovering the Substantive Nature of Landscape,” Kenneth Olwig (presently a professor in the Department of Landscape Planning at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences), provides a useful starting point for this discussion with a detailed history and rehabilitation of the long-standing geographic concept of landscape. Through both an etymological excavation, and a philosophical recovery project, Olwig wants to re-establish a set of linkages between place and identity, including the links (non-deterministic to be sure) between the particularities embedded in the struggles over such geographic phenomena as landscapes, communities, and territories and the specific knowledges built through those struggles around such concepts as morality, ethics, justice, nature, and environmental equity.
Olwig’s paper, which is also instructive on the contested nature of geographic thought itself as it tracks the waxing and waning importance of the landscape concept in the discipline, points to the important nexus between people and the places they inhabit. Through Olwig’s analysis of landscape (in its various interpretations), we come to see how places and people are mutually constituted. Where one is in the world plays a crucial role in how and what one is in the world. The kinds of relationships and networks discussed by Fraser (new social movements) and Young (social groups) actually exist in particular times and places, and these material dimensions of their existence, as Olwig argues, matter a great deal to their make-up and to the acculturating effects they exert on their inhabitants. Knowing one’s place means more than a knowledge of the physical landscape, and clearly implies knowing one’s position in social, cultural, political, and power landscapes as well. Such knowledges are built in particular times and places through the performance of everyday practices in interaction with others, and such practices vary over time and among and between places. As Olwig’s paper makes clear, it is through such grounded practices that we develop significant aspects of our notions of justice, ethics, and morality, for good or ill.
remains to be done “on spatial inequality and injustice in particular contexts.” Without second-guessing precisely what Smith is suggesting in these two examples, it is important to keep Harvey’s caution in mind to keep such work from slipping into either status quo or counter-revolutionary modes (an indeterminate cultural relativism in the first case, or a mere documenting of human injustice to humans in the second).
Smith’s final sets of considerations address one additional dimension of moral progress in geography:
professional ethics and the matter of “good” geographers. Here we simply emphasize Smith’s point that a concern with progressive scholarship obligates scholars (including geographers) to think carefully about the products and processes of their work. Smith’s concern with the ethical treatment of research “subjects” is just one of these considerations. We take these matters up in detail in the next section.
The final paper in this section by Sarah Whatmore (Chapter 7) (currently Professor of Environment and Public Policy at Oxford University) opens up key questions about identity, the ethical subject and the spatial relations of ethics, morality, and justice. Whatmore develops three key arguments in the paper: (1) in a discussion that draws upon recent work in feminist scholarship, and that resonates with major elements of the other papers in this section, Whatmore reframes and deepens our understanding of people as always constructed in relation to others, rather than as autonomous; (2) drawing upon work in environmental ethics, she makes an argument for extending moral considerability beyond the human; and (3) she considers the spatial implications for justice considered in these relational ways. The thread that ties the three arguments together is the possibility of expanding the notion of ethical community, and for extending the purview of justice.
Whatmore’s first argument seeks to problematize the notion of the autonomous, independent self. The adherence to individualized notions of self and other, inherited from early Enlightenment thinkers (e.g. Locke), erects boundaries that prohibit the extension of moral considerability. Such formulations, Whatmore argues, contribute directly to a geography of proximity and homogeneity (i.e. a bounded “us” at a variety of scales: individual, neighborhood, nation) where care and justice obtain (though often quite unevenly), and a sharply demarcated, heterogeneous outside, where such considerations apply much less consistently, if at all. If the boundaries between self and other can be seen as always artificial, blurry, and dialectical, then one’s obligations and sense of caring and justice might more readily be extended to an always-already co-present “we.”
The second argument, drawing directly on evolving scholarship in environmental ethics, makes an analagous case for extending the boundary of moral considerability to the other entities (both human and non-human) with which we share the planet. By drawing out parallels based on the interconnectedness of human beings in relation to networks of other living and non-living “things,” Whatmore’s argument attempts to avoid the dilemmas that environmental ethicists have faced when trying to extend human-centered moral considerability to non-humans and the environment. These difficulties arise precisely from the same foundational concepts of autonomy and separateness that are typically encountered in extending care (morality, ethics, justice) to human “others.”
Whatmore argues that these problems are eased considerably when we are no longer able to postulate our identities (our subjecthood or self) in isolation from the networks in which we are always embedded. Just as we are always relationally defined by interaction with other people, we are materially (corporeally) immersed in the complicated relationships that comprise the biosphere. Understanding the always-already nature of these relationships both constrains us from thinking ourselves separately and enables the extension of moral considerability to other organisms and inanimate “nature.”
Whatmore’s final set of comments seeks to make all of this explicitly spatial. She is interested, here, in thinking through the possibilities of extending what feminist scholars (e.g. Gilligan, 1982) have called an “ethic of care.” If notions of autonomy and independence allow for moral considerability largely on the basis of proximity (whether materially or affectively), Whatmore argues that notions of the self dialectically and continuously in relation to
“others” should help us rethink our concepts of “nearness” and “distance.” What she is articulating in these passages, we would suggest, is an alternative topology of justice. In this topology, we need an alternative metric.
Linear distance can no longer be the measure of near or far “others” who always co-habit the networks we share.
Perhaps such metrics as density and intensity of connections, necessity and frequency of reciprocity, or stability or ephemerality of affinities, could serve as the new measures that would allow us to map these alternative imaginaries of geographic justice and morality.
M A K I N G J U S T I C E S P A T I A L 93
The readings in this section help to open up some of the critical theoretical and conceptual issues that are entailed in a commitment to progressive (or, in Harvey’s terms, revolutionary) geographic scholarship. The pieces also point to (explicitly in the case of Smith and Whatmore) a variety of pressing issues concerning the practice of progressive geography. We turn to these issues in the next section.
INTRODUCTION
One part of mankind appears to have become captive of its own achievements in technology, economic growth, and the creation of an affluent materialistic society in which interpersonal relationships and some of the more simple intangible pleasures of life are becoming increasingly lost.
Another part is still captive of the ills of an earlier age – poverty, ignorance, disease, economic exploitation, racial discrimination, and so on. We all have a personal interest in the process of liberation, for we are ourselves among the captives. As geographers we have a special role – a truly creative and revolutionary one – that of helping to reveal the spatial malfunctionings and injustices, and contributing to the design of a spatial order of society in which people can be really free to fulfil themselves in a secure social setting where the rights of all are respected. This, surely, would be ‘progress in geography’.
(Smith, 1973: 121).
A quarter of a century ago I made these observations on progress in geography, in concluding an outline of what was to become the welfare approach (Smith, 1977). Living in South Africa, I was arguing for engagement with contemporary moral problems, like apartheid, which attracted little attention among the majority of the profession. Apartheid was such an obvious target as to invite moral certainty, while the intellectual environment of the times encouraged faith in reason as a source of human betterment. Both these positions rest uneasily with the prevailing sentiments of this supposedly postmodern age, with its suspicion of truth claims and conceptions of progress associated with modernity. Yet, as I read these words again, I find
nothing with which to quarrel. Some states of affairs are bad, and should be struggled against and changed.
Such was apartheid in South Africa. Such is ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia. Such is mass starvation in central Africa. These are as close to moral truths as can be imagined, and those who deny them are wrong.
What I am prepared to concede now is that the notion of progress has become deeply problematic.
I was writing at a time when faith in managerial rationality harnessed to the advance of technology supported a conception of human progress as almost linear inevitability, interrupted only by such occasional blips as localized urban insurrections and distant wars. This was potently evoked by the stages of econ-omic growth theory of Walt Rostow (1960), with the take-off from traditional society to the age of high mass consumption depicted with the reliability of jet propulsion. Our understanding of progress is now more circumspect, tarnished as it is by the experience of abiding poverty, an environmental crisis, the demise of socialism, the instability of capitalism and repeated reminders of rampant human cruelty.
Nevertheless, it is a mistake to dismiss any notion of progress as Enlightenment error. While the affluent endure postmodern ambiguity and uncertainty in comfort, for those at the coal-face of human misery what constitutes progress is still likely to be self-evident.
Indeed, in such contexts the very term ‘progressive’, as both adjective and noun, implies not only a moral stand but also a political commitment, as was the case with opposition to apartheid in South Africa, for example. To be (a) progressive means taking the side of the oppressed, the poor, the worst-off.