Evolving Water Ethics with the Help of Bernard Lonergan

Abstract

Water ethics is a developing field for which a diverse literature has appeared over the past several decades. It arises out of increasing concerns about the threatened state of water, and human and ecosystem water security in the midst of a growing global water crisis. In an increasingly high-stakes world of water poverty, user competition, and conflict amidst shortfalls projected to affect nearly half of humanity by mid-century, water ethics calls for explicit attention to ethics in the ways in which freshwater is valued, governed and utilized. Water ethics literature comes out of diverse sources and philosophies such as utilitarianism, liberal equality, ecofeminism, physiocentric ethics, communitarian, pragmatist and religious ethics. My research and thesis involved a thematic review and critical analysis of water ethics literature using a problem-response method to identify current needs of the water ethics discourse,and to propose solutions. For this, I drew upon the philosophy, theology, and method of Bernard Lonergan (1904 – 1984). Some of the needs and challenges identified included an overarching need for a new water ethic, a need to go beyond utilitarianist and anthropocentric approaches, and a need to clarify the roles of theology and philosophy at a time when water governance is called to be fair and participatory in the multicultural, multi-religious world of freshwater. The literature also lacked a differentiation of values and could benefit from Lonergan's integral scale of vital, social, cultural, personal and religious values. Understanding these value relations could help in moving beyond reductionism to monetary utilitarian terms. The most central problem found in the water ethics literature was a lack of cognitive and epistemological grounding. Most considerations alluding to grounding water ethics were given to identifying best principles and concepts such as human rights, justice, and sustainable development. References to finding a valid epistemology and a metaethics remained incomplete. Methods and frameworks that were brought forth did not go further than proposals to identify and reason about values and ethics prior to somehow reordering values, or doing "ethical bricolage." In light of historicity and multiculturalism, a basis for normativity and objectivity in justifying water decisions was missing. As well, regarding the subject-object referent, the subject was largely absent in the water ethics literature. These appear to be symptoms of underlying problems of conceptualism, and the incomplete epistemological turn since Descartes and Kant. The works of Lonergan consulted – Insight, and his post-Insight writings – were found to provide the resources necessary to clarify the identified needs and problems. On Lonergan's account, we first need to know what we are doing as knowers and choosers. Lonergan's empirically verifiable cognitional theory grounds an epistemology, offering a critical realism and method for water ethics. His Generalized Empirical Method (GEM) goes to the common core of the related and recurrent operations in conscious intentionality that may be discerned in both natural science and human studies. GEM could thus provide the underlying metamethod of the transdisciplinary needs of ethical water governance. Science, engineering, economics, sociology, philosophy, ethics, and theology––these differ in many manners, but their objectivity depends invariably on unbiased attentiveness, intelligence, reasonableness, and responsibility in the human subjects involved. Lonergan's account was also used in a brief look at the International Joint Commission to identify factors of effectiveness for water institutions in decision-making and creating value. A final chapter employs Lonergan's account, and the encyclical Laudato Si' of Pope Francis, in looking into the roles of theology and philosophy in the longer-term project of overcoming water poverty and creating a new water ethic. Finally, it was found that in both analysis and initial theory application trials, Lonergan's method provided robust support in the diverse problems encountered by water ethics.