Critical realist ethical naturalism: Generic and fit for degrowth?

Abstract

In this article I explore what critical realist critical ethical naturalism offers degrowth. I briefly set out what degrowth seeks to achieve. I then move on to provide a short account of what critical ethical naturalism is a reaction to, before setting out a generic critical realist account. I then move on to discuss what it offers and some of the issues that may arise, illustrated using Andrew Collier's and Ted Benton's differences over intrinsic worth.

Introduction

In an article in Ecological Economics devoted to fostering dialogue between degrowth and critical realism Hubert Buch-Hansen and Iana Nesterova argue that ‘degrowth needs a philosophy of science’ and that, problems notwithstanding, ‘degrowth scholarship contains many elements that are consistent with critical realism’ (Buch-Hansen and Nesterova, 2021: 2). This is a somewhat diplomatic way of saying that laudable though it is, degrowth sometimes lacks underlying consistency and clarity and that critical realism offers solutions. This claim broadly echoes commentary from Clive Spash (Spash and Morgan, 2025). Over the years, Spash has raised the issue of consistency and clarity many times. In particular, he argues that there is a need for systematic realist philosophical underlabouring with a view to developing explanatory critique. For Spash, critical realism provides a means to push the argument for viable and preferred alternative ways of living, and this work has culminated in his recent Foundations of Social Ecological Economics, albeit degrowth literature is not his main focus in that book (Spash, 2024). As Buch-Hansen and Nesterova note, degrowth has come a long way since its launch as an activist slogan. It has become a multi and interdisciplinary endeavour with roots in ecological economics and a pervasive commitment to transformative praxis. It has, in many ways, become an important focal point for those persuaded that the current organisation and drivers of socio-economies cannot and ultimately will not continue.

In this article I focus on what critical realism offers regarding a key element of the degrowth project and that is reorienting norms and ethics as a contribution to different ways of ‘being in the world’. This is a significant concern because a value shift is an important correlate of transitions able to manifest the kind of social redesign necessary to underpin degrowth. The main vehicle for the argument is critical ethical naturalism. I begin by briefly summarising what degrowth sets out to achieve. I then set out some of the issues to which critical ethical naturalism is a response and then provide a generic critical realist position on critical ethical naturalism. In the final two sections I discuss what this account offers degrowth, while also highlighting some of its limits, illustrated by disagreement regarding environmental values and intrinsic worth, drawing on the work of Andrew Collier and Ted Benton. I conclude with some general comment on implications for the relationship between critical realism and degrowth.

Note, by ‘norm’ I mean societal guidelines for how one ought to behave in given contexts in order to conform to expectations, and for which there are typically (expectations of) sanctions and rewards for conformity and its lack. These guidelines may be formal or informal, explicit or implicit, and norms extend also to feelings one ought to have and attitudes one ought to present. The terms ‘ethics’ and ‘morals’ are used interchangeably for a variety, or perhaps aspect, of norm to which attach meanings and judgements such as (accepting there are other uses of some of these terms) good, bad, right, wrong, just, unjust, fair, and so on.

Degrowth

According to Vincent Liegey and Anitra Nelson, degrowth organises around the principle of ‘living within Earth's regenerative limits in socially equitable and collectively supportive ways’ (Liegey and Nelson, 2020: 3). It is ‘at once, both a qualitative and a quantitative concept’, and has provoked ‘significant misunderstanding’ (Liegey and Nelson, 2020: 2). The most damaging of these misunderstandings is the conflation of degrowth with recession. Jason Hickel succinctly contrasts the two (Hickel, 2021: 1108):

Recessions are unintended, degrowth concerns planned, coherent policy.

Degrowth targets less necessary and more harmful economic activity, recessions do not.

Recessions create unemployment and damage livelihoods, degrowth redirects resources and seeks just transitions, whilst generally focusing on improved livelihoods.

Recessions tend to exacerbate (wealth and income) inequality, whilst degrowth seeks to reduce inequality, sharing national and global income more fairly.

Recessions typically lead to austerity in which public goods and services suffer, degrowth looks to ‘decommodify’ foundational goods.

Degrowth advocates rapid transition to renewable energy and reversal of ecological breakdown, recession typically causes such policy to be abandoned based on short term overriding concern to ‘get growth going’.

The need to combat the conflation of degrowth and recession is indicative of the systemic distance between what degrowth advocates want to achieve and where we are now (for context, see Gills and Morgan, 2022; Fullbrook and Morgan, 2019, 2024). As Giorgos Kallis, Susan Paulson, Giacomo D’Alisa and Frederico Demaria put it in The Case for Degrowth, growthism has become a commonsense, reproduced across societies. They counterpose accelerated lives, planned obsolescence and overproduction for superfluous consumption, to a degrowth ethos of ‘doing less with less’ and ‘slower by design’ (Kallis et al., 2020). Concomitantly, they propose a series of individual localised changes that can connect together and start to coevolve, creating momentum for community ecosystems oriented on degrowth concerns. However, they also note that not everything can be achieved by local activism and change. Some things require macro-political change, and this too can be achieved by incremental attempts to shift the balance of activity within existing economy and society. This strategy can be briefly itemised as (see Kallis et al., 2020; Morgan, 2020:123–124):

Foster local communal, cooperative, mutual aid and credit union initiatives and draw as much activity into this developing domain of local social provisioning as possible – land use, food production, transport options, distribution, and so on – localise and empower communities and keep as much decision making as possible at this local level.

Pressure government to prioritise commons-facilitating initiatives, rather than only support marketised commercial business.

Campaign for an immediate moratorium on new fossil fuel development and for accelerated phase out of fossil fuels. Advocate for Green New Deal policies that adopt degrowth principles, while also insisting on decent wages and conditions. Reduce working hours per worker on the assumption that much of the work people undertake is superfluous use of time and that less work leaves more time for alternative non-monetised activity, while also creating greater scope for more of the population to share in available work.

Advocate mechanisms that provide alternatives to current economic imperatives that undermine the capacity to make different choices, and which support social provisioning goals: universal basic income (UBI), universal basic services (UBS – education, housing, healthcare, transport) and universal basic care (UBC – recognition of the value of otherwise unpaid activity that is vital to a functioning society). Advocate a massive redirection of societal resources to foundational goods and services (health and social care, education, etc.).

Reform public finances (drawing on insights from different strands of heterodox economics), address the power of commercial banks to create money through debt and advocate for ‘positive’ money.

As a recent thematic review by Nick Fitzpatrick, Timothée Parrique and Inês Cosme notes, while short, itemised lists of foci such as the above abound, none are comprehensive. Rather, ‘degrowth has grown increasingly complex’ and it has ‘become difficult to assess what degrowth looks like in a single, coherent agenda’ (Fitzpatrick, Parrique and Cosme, 2022: 1). The article identifies an initial 1892 possible sources on degrowth from 2005 to 2020 and reduces this initial number to 446 for analysis, sorting them into 50 policy goals, 100 objectives and 340 instruments. In addition to the above, the authors, for example, highlight a theme of ‘governance and geopolitics’ that seeks to deepen democracy and reform international organisations, such as the WTO, IMF and World Bank. Taken together, however, the policies amount to dismantling contemporary neoliberal capitalism. Interestingly though, while the review draws attention to the ‘diversity and plurality of values and visions’, it makes no thematic mention of ways of being, communicative efficacy, contesting and constructing norms, values, or ethics, or the scope for moral suasion. Still, perhaps the lack of mention of these in a thematic review is because they are givens, insofar as there is a well-understood ethos and the baseline argument for degrowth is that it is necessary, urgent and good for you (shadowed by an ominous sense of adverse futures without it). The Case for Degrowth, for example, makes the point:

The most immediate case for degrowth that we try to communicate in this book is that a modest life based on cooperation and sharing is desirable in and of itself… The case for degrowth is not about martyred self-denial or constraining human potential; it is about reorienting socio-economies to support collaborative and creative construction of lives that are pleasurable, healthy, satisfying and sustainable for more people and more places. (Kallis et al., 2020: 106 and 108–109; emphasis added)

However, insofar as connections can be made and dialogue had between critical realism and degrowth, issues of norms, ethics and ‘being’ seem worthy of further discussion. Many of the issues eventually converge on critical realist ethical naturalism.

Subjectivism as a prompt to critical realist ethical naturalism

A key element of the degrowth project is reorienting norms and ethics as a contribution to different ways of being in the world. This is a subject that critical realism has had a great deal to say about and regarding which it can offer degrowth conceptual resources. However, the arguments made have origins in several reactions to then dominant currents in philosophy, especially logical empiricism, subjectivism and consequentialism's implications for ethical theory, and it is worth briefly laying these out and illustrating the reaction.

As readers are likely aware, the logical empiricists set themselves the task of clarifying scientific method and in so doing rejected metaphysics and reduced the role of philosophy to one of logic or clarity of structure for the purposes of science. A great deal has been written about the work of the logical empiricists and it is important to acknowledge that their work evolved beyond its early Vienna Circle origins (Creath, 2023). However, the rejection of metaphysics (what today we might call the role of ontology in exploring issues of reality) by logical empiricists had stark implications for ethical theory and these have persisted, albeit in different forms. ¹ The archetype for the challenge logical empiricism posed is found in A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic (Ayer, 1983 [1936]). From a logical empiricist point of view the intelligible world reduces to atomic facts, the investigation of which allows for (in logical empiricism's original form) verifiable truth claims. For example, ‘What is the molecular make up of water?’ is a question whose answer can have synthetic truth content. Thus a molecule of water consists of one atom of oxygen and two of hydrogen. However, from a logical empiricist point of view, there is no equivalent procedure for ‘murder is wrong’. Ayer states:

The exhortations to moral virtue are not propositions at all, but ejaculations or commands which are designed to provoke the reader to action of a certain sort. Accordingly, they do not belong to any branch of philosophy or science. As for the expressions of ethical judgments… inasmuch as they are certainly neither definitions nor comments upon definitions, nor quotations, we may say decisively that they do not belong to ethical philosophy. A strictly philosophical treatise on ethics should therefore make no ethical pronouncements. But it should, by giving an analysis of ethical terms, show what is the category to which all such pronouncements belong. (Ayer, 1983 [1936]: 137)

What one has here is a separation of positive and normative along the lines of sense and nonsense and this provides a variant on Hume's older theme of the separation of is and ought. As Ayer's work illustrates, Hume's theme was eventually to lead to anti-naturalism and ‘subjectivism' in ethics, albeit this subjectivism has had various strands – Ayer, for example, is often referred to as a proponent of ‘emotivism'. ²

Versions of subjectivism came to dominate moral philosophy in the English speaking world by the mid-twentieth century and subjectivism, fairly obviously, lends itself to moral irrealism and licenses moral relativism. In this kind of reasoning ethics become beliefs or expressions of opinion, subject to limitations on agreement. You can maybe argue about the facts of the matter one applies to a case (asking whether motives were misconstrued, effects misjudged, circumstances not appreciated, etc.) but there are no similar grounds to argue about the values involved. ³ We may say genocide is wrong, others elsewhere may say genocide is right, but there is no relevant objective ground to distinguish these two (if the facts of the matter are the same, the values are merely the values applied – the ones we have around here and the ones you have someplace else, the ones held by Group A and the ones held by Group B, etc.). One side is no more than ‘hooray for (this) genocide’ and the other no more than ‘boo to (that) genocide’. Moreover, the issues raised parallel ones found in consequentialism, since subjectivism and consequentialism can readily converge on ‘right action is that which has the best consequences’. ⁴ Consequentialism too has the troubling implication that, subject to circumstances, no acts are intrinsically objectionable. ⁵ This brings us to reactions and illustrations.

Among the first and most significant for our purposes is the work of Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot and Iris Murdoch. As Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman discuss in Metaphysical Animals these four found themselves in opposition to the dominant currents in modern philosophy in the aftermath of World War Two and in the light of their observation of its events – not just the atrocities of the Holocaust, but also the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and so on (Cumhail and Wiseman, 2022). The following from Anscombe's ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ (in which she also coins the term consequentialism) gives a sense of what they were to argue towards:

No circumstances, and no expected consequences, which do not modify the description of the procedure as one of judicially punishing a man for what he is known not to have done can modify the description of it as unjust. Someone who attempted to dispute this would only be pretending not to know what ‘unjust' means: for this is a paradigm case of injustice… it is clear that a good man is a just man; and a just man is a man who habitually refuses to commit or participate in any unjust actions for fear of any consequences, or to obtain any advantage, for himself or anyone else… if someone thinks, in advance, that it is open to question whether such an action as procuring the judicial execution of the innocent should be quite excluded from consideration – I do not want to argue with him; he shows a corrupt mind… justice is a virtue and injustice a vice… an act of injustice will tend to make a man bad; and essentially the flourishing of a man qua man consists in his being good (e.g., in virtues)… [but this needs] an account of human nature, human action, the type of characteristic a virtue is, and above all of human flourishing. (Anscombe, 1958: 16–18; emphasis added)

This quote reflects a number of themes that these philosophers shared: an adequate moral philosophy/ ethical theory must be able to ground objections to some actions and outcomes, even though we live in a world where moral philosophy can no longer be built on divine law (i.e. insofar as moral obligation cannot be justified for all based on theological grounds); it must be able to reject the claim that consequences trump all other considerations, and it must be able to recognise that decisions are complicated by context and that universal principle (along Kantian lines) cannot readily tell us what to do in real situations. Ultimately, these philosophers found themselves contesting the Humean separation of is and ought and also questioning philosophy as high-minded sceptical thought of insular, for all intents and purposes disembodied, rational individuals, cut-off (in their reasoning) from emotion and relationships with the people and world around them. As such, their work provided a platform for moral cognitivism, that is, the possibility of correspondence between moral claims and moral facts and to achieve their ends, they found themselves looking to Aristotle, albeit in a modern context and with due attention to other thinkers, such as Wittgenstein. Their works constitute important contributions to the revival of virtue ethics (to which one might also add the work of Alisdair MacIntyre, Martha Nussbaum and various others in the late twentieth century and early twenty first).

In any case, the reaction against logical empiricism, subjectivism, consequentialism and moral relativism, and the scope for moral cognitivism, provided important background concerns for critical ethical naturalism – and Andrew Sayer in particular draws explicitly on the work of Midgley et al. (see Sayer and Morgan 2022). It should be noted, however, that there are various ways in which realists have come to explore normativity, values and ethics and found themselves concerned with critical ethical naturalist themes. Many of the early realists were socialists who came to academia in the late 1960s through to the 1980s (see Benton and Morgan, 2025b). This was a period in which Marxism was being rethought by some and abandoned or repudiated by others in response to the revelations regarding Stalin, the later repression in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, and also in the light of the need for all kinds of industrial economies to address growing problems of environmental damage. For example, the publication of early manuscripts from Marx gave rise to a humanist strand of Marxism emphasising the role of agency, while Louis Althusser's work gave rise to structural Marxism, locating the work humanists were interested in on one side of an ‘epistemological break’. More generally, Marxists/socialists, critical theorists and others found themselves thinking about voluntarism and determinism and the scope and meaning of emancipation.

Generic critical realist ethical naturalism

The introduction to this special issue discusses in detail the basic concepts and common commitments of critical realism: underlabouring, depth realism, stratification and emergence, epistemic and ontic fallacies, the commitment to and difference between epistemological relativism and judgmental rationality, and so on (see also Archer et al. 1998; Buch-Hansen and Nielsen 2020; Collier 1994;). Keeping this in mind as background, it seems reasonable to move directly to critical realist ethical naturalism – its critical version of ethical naturalism. A common set of commitments can be synthesised – a generic version of critical ethical naturalism – that degrowth can make use of. This, of course, necessarily emphasises commonality rather than difference between proponents (see later). It should also be noted that much of the argument by proponents is posed as versions of what any reasonable person might recognise in the world around them, if they stop to think about what they experience, observe, care about and do (see Ash, 2022; Bhaskar, 1993: 15, 98; Collier, 1999, 2003; Lawson, 2015; Sayer, 2011, 2019). The following more or less follow in order:

Ought and is. While it is arguable whether an ought can be logically deduced from an is (there are many attempts to establish it can), even if it cannot, reducing relevance of the relationship between the two to logical deduction-only is overly restrictive and impedes proper understanding of the world. Ought and is can be conjoined by convention and in this context (which may or may not be deemed a logical relation if suitably constructed in argument) appropriate contextual understanding of described (factual) situations readily lead to inference of appropriate conduct (what should be done). For example, owing can lead to the inference one ought to fulfil the duty owed (pay a debt). More profoundly, is can lead to ought via fulfilment of need, but only if one is committed to meeting that need. For example, a baby requires feeding and positive loving stimulation and a designated responsible adult ought to meet these needs. To fail to do so would be deemed a failure to respond appropriately to the (factual) situation. Clearly, this line of reasoning requires an idea of what it means for someone to flourish and a commitment (an obligation) to see that they do. Underlying this is a creature that has a capacity to ‘care’ (in the sense of care about what happens to others) and the capacity to undertake a process of evaluation in regard of that care. To be ‘callous’, for example, is to act without appropriate feeling, and is a judgement about both the state of mind and the act undertaken, whose implication is that appropriate feeling is important to both intention and action – a generalised notion of caring. The important point, however, is that capacities are not unique to an individual but common to our species, and so there are grounds for objectivity in the sense of ‘true of or to’ rather than ‘value free’. As such, an ought can be reasonably derived (if not necessarily deduced) from an is in various ways, and so a strict Humean separation either does not hold or is not always what is relevant.

Evolved social animals with characteristic ways of being and doing. We are not just individuals who live in groups for convenience, we have evolved as social animals and who we are is bound up in our social relations with others. It is truistic or circular to say that we are self-interested, since more or less anything we do can be reframed – if tortuously – as an act of self-interest; what matters is that our sense of interest recognises that it is bound up with the fate of others and our concern for both self and others. As the example of nurturing a baby shows, need and obligation can be very different than that which might be encapsulated by a conception of an isolated individual undertaking self-interested rational calculation to determine their conduct. We are embodied and embrained – a physio-chemical biosystem – and we feel about and because of things. There is a continuous interplay of bodily processes and states of mind and thus each of us is a developing (socio-culturally situated) entity of feeling and reasoning. As such, our emotions are a commentary on our state of being. So, not only does a strict Humean separation not hold but also neither does the classic Cartesian separation.

Capable, needy evaluative and ethical beings. With the previous point in mind, we are not a species whose scope of being is restricted to frivolous sensuous satisfactions, and our state of being is more than merely transitory hedonistic pleasure-pain responses. We are capable yet needy, vulnerable social creatures. We have a sense of our self and our place in the world, we have hopes, dreams and aspirations, not just for ourselves but for others. Things matter to us, our relationships with others matter to us. We have needs (extending to socio-culturally elaborated capabilities) that can be met or not, and while there may be different (socio-cultural) ways to meet needs, we can be physically and psychologically (psychosocially) harmed and we can be healthy. As the kind of social animal we are, how we are treated and how we treat others can cause us to flourish or suffer. Among others, love, recognition, feeling we are treated appropriately and that we have treated others appropriately (fairly, etc.) contribute to our health. Meeting the needs of the kind of social animal we are thus means flourishing that includes ethical conduct as part of our being. While it may be a scholastic fallacy to identify everyday activity with the deliberative life of the mind of the academic, there is an intrinsic evaluative and ethical aspect to human relationships and thus to social activity.

Better treatment for better being. If our emotions are a commentary on our state of being, they can be more or less attuned and, through reflection and dialogue, we can reason with ourselves and others over how we and they feel – assessing whether our feelings and responses are ‘appropriate’. Sayer puts this nicely, ‘Feelings give us indications of tendencies towards flourishing or suffering; they have ‘valence’. Emotions assign value to experiences. They both monitor and motivate us. Hence they are both world guided and world guiding. Feelings are not simply subjective products of the mind, though we can subjectively interpret them in different ways’ (Sayer 2019: 263). The process can not only influence our enduring state of mind but also inform practical reasoning. Similarly, we can assess whether current ways of satisfying needs – the societies we live in – are adequate. The very need for such terms as ‘appropriate’ and ‘adequate’ indicates that, as evaluative beings who can flourish or suffer, we can be mistaken about what is good for ourselves and others, and we can learn to live differently and treat others and ourselves differently. Our state of being in the world is fallible and corrigible.

Critical realists then, do not tend to argue that there is a Platonic ‘good’ or some such, but rather that there are ways of being and ways of treating ourselves and others that are objectively good for us and bad for us – our subjective values are about something (well-being). This is a qualified naturalism in the sense that it is not an opposition of a foundational pre-social human nature to culture and society, but rather a process of emergence and socialisation. That it is a ‘critical’ naturalism is an inference drawn from the observation that we can live in ways that are more or less good for us as the kind of social animals we are – insofar as we are capable of reflecting on those ways of living, and insofar as we are capable of working to transform the ways in which we live in order to favour well-being or flourishing over suffering. It is also morally realist in at least the minimal sense that the way we are matters to whether in fact our conduct and our beliefs about appropriate conduct accord with what is good for us (well-being, flourishing). Put another way, it is morally realist insofar as there is a truth to the matter that does not reduce to unsubstantiated belief or opinion. We are, in a sense, able to discover things about ourselves as a species that foster our well-being and inform how we treat each other – at the same time, we are, of course, creative beings, and so there is an inventive element to this process but it is not an ‘anything goes’ and ethics is not an isolated aspect of the human. It is in the light of this understanding that Collier's comment that Bhaskar's critical realist ethics set off a search for a ‘moral reality which it is up to us to discover, rather than one which it is down to us to invent’ (Collier 1999: vii) should be read.

It should also be clear that there is at least a suggestion that as a species we treat each other as though each of us possess being that has intrinsic worth. This starts from our sense of self – we start from the basic understanding that each of us is its own end and when treated, as a matter of course, merely as means to another's ends we experience this as a violation, an affront to our human dignity. ⁶ It is a small leap from this sense of self to that of equivalence of others, at least in principle, if not always in practice. We afford value to ourselves and, as social animals, significant others, in ways that impute value to being. Furthermore, for critical realists:

5. The issue of treatment is more expansive than merely how we treat each other. Realists tend to place normativity within something like Roy Bhaskar's concept of ‘four-planar social being’: ‘These four planes are a) of material transactions with nature; b) of inter-personal intra- or inter-action; c) of social relations; and d) of intra-subjectivity’ (Bhaskar, 1993: 153; see also Figure 2.25, 160).

For realists, the social world is emergent from, dependent on and acts back upon the rest of reality. We are one species among many in ecosystems within a biosphere on a planet that existed before us and will likely exist after us; but insofar as we ‘materially transact’, our relationship with the non-social world is not merely transactional, if by that we mean without feeling or solely extractive and exploitative. While we are social animals with needs, those needs are not restricted to the social environment because we are social animals. They include experience in and appreciation of the non-social or natural world. With all of the above in mind, how we treat other species and the non-social world which come within our orbit for our own ends are, if we are ethical beings, thus a matter of moral considerability over and above their role in our self-preservation (though clearly that matters too).

We are, however, in danger of getting ahead of ourselves. In any case, the focus of critical realist ethical naturalism on flourishing or well-being leads to crossover with virtue ethics as ‘dispositions of the will’ that we cultivate, and which are developed by dialogue, reflection and practice. Virtue is not a name for something arbitrary but rather provides a means by which we seek to flourish via working on our state of being in a fallible and corrigible world. It is about evaluative being in the world. ⁷ For virtue ethicists, good and bad are not typically standalone terms in anything but a thin sense. They acquire traction in context. For example, in a given context, to act in way x may be to do harm (cause suffering) y. The consequence may be described as (which is simultaneously an evaluation of the situation) cruel, cowardly, selfish, unjust, and/or exploitative. This contrasts with alternative conduct that might be described as kind, brave, generous, just, nurturing/supportive/sympathetic, and so on. Though much, of course, turns on whether description/evaluation is appropriate or adequate in the given case, in context, the former list are readily judged to be ‘bad’ and the latter ‘good’. So, good can be of a general type, ‘good for this kind of entity as such’ or be a specified ‘good in this particular instance’. In any case, from a critical realist ethical naturalist point of view, virtue ethics is one way to orient us to make better decisions, bridging self and other-regarding behaviour in a messy world of difficult contexts. Sustained well-being is rarely achieved through prioritising a particular good to the detriment of all else. There are always competing goods and a need for balance and most of the time we are negotiating situations of relative flourishing and suffering.

To be clear, however, realists are not virtue ethicists per se but rather share a common interest in Aristotelian flourishing and a common target – a debilitating subjectivism based on a common commitment (scope for moral cognitivism). Moreover, there are several strands of the reaction against logical empiricism and consequentialism with overlapping concerns – virtue ethics, capability theory, care ethics, and so on. These help to make sense of some of the aspects of ontology with which realists are concerned (and vice versa) as, of course, does, as noted, historically speaking, a Marxist/socialist inspired interest in emancipation (discussed Benton and Morgan 2025b).

What does critical realist ethical naturalism offer degrowth?

Regarding degrowth as ‘necessary, urgent and good for you’, critical ethical naturalism clearly speaks to the ‘good for you’ component. It highlights that degrowth is not asking people to change their natures, but rather to be different in how they attend to and cultivate their being and its potential – with due concern for care, community, conviviality, and so on. However, attention to flourishing is scarcely likely to be a new insight for degrowth proponents and it is not primarily the originality of any ethical claim that critical realism offers degrowth. Rather, it is the cumulative argument for, and positioning of, ethics within a broader ontology that adds additional credence to ethical stances. For example, as previously noted, realists tend to place normativity within Roy Bhaskar's concept of ‘four-planar social being’ or something like it. As Buch-Hansen and Nesterova (2023) note, degrowth requires ‘deep transformations’ on these four interrelated planes of social being (see also Buch-Hansen, Koch and Nesterova, 2024).

I noted in the introduction that Clive Spash has been arguing for many years that critical realism's main attraction for ecological economics is that it provides a counter to unstructured, uncritical eclecticism, which tends to invite incoherence and inconsistency. While degrowth does not reduce to ecological economics (Daly and Morgan, 2019), it does share the same tendency, albeit for different reasons – degrowth began as a political slogan and social movement, drawing on disparate inspirations in a time when strong social constructivism has been a major influence on progressive social movements. Strong social constructivism is different than logical empiricism in lots of ways but shares the same issue regarding subjectivism and ethics.

Critical realism meanwhile encourages us to pay attention to scope for theory-practice inconsistency, provides resources in argument to counter fallacies and orients questioning (see later example). Realists argue that subjectivism leads to a theory-practice inconsistency. By this realists typically mean the tendency for divergence between the claims made for concepts and the implications for conduct. The main target has been post modernism and strong social constructionism whose collapse of belief and truth, and sceptical standpoint regarding whether anything can be said about an independent reality, do not prevent proponents looking both ways when they cross the road, leaving buildings by the front door rather than the 23rd story window, and depending on an oncologist to cure them of cancer rather than a janitor (or facing the consequences if they fail to do so). In particular, strong social construction sits awkwardly with claims about climate change and ecological breakdown.

For its proponents, realism provides a philosophical ‘underlabouring' service: it provides tools to get some kinds of (counterproductive or oppositional) arguments out of the way without itself getting in the way. At its best critical realism is (but not only) a progressive philosophical permission structure. That said, I’ve been involved in critical realism for over twenty five years. I’ve known (and interviewed) most of its prime movers over the years and spent a lot of time around postgraduates in their initial phase of enthusiasm for realism. A note of caution is needed. A lot of the appeal of critical realism is that it is philosophy that can be read and grasped without any background in the discipline. One might argue it fulfils the aspirations of the Radical Philosophy movement set out in its 1972 statement of purpose:

Contemporary British philosophy is at a dead end. Its academic practitioners have all but abandoned the attempt to understand the world, let alone change it. They have made philosophy into a narrow and specialised academic subject of little interest to anyone outside the small circle of Professional Philosophers. Many students and teachers are now dissatisfied with this state of affairs, but so far they have been isolated. The result has been that serious philosophical work outside the conventional sphere has been minimal. The Radical Philosophy group has been set up to challenge this situation, by people within philosophy departments and other fields of work. ⁸

Much of critical realism offers itself as good sense that speaks to what we intuitively think to be the case. Moreover, it is mainly written by scholars keen to be understood, rather than to confound and impress. Andrew Sayers’ work is a prime example:

Well-being and ill-being are indeed states of being, not merely subjective value-judgements. . . The very assumption that judgements of value and objectivity don’t mix – an assumption that is sometimes built into the definition of ‘objectivity’ – is a misconception. . . How people can live together is not merely a matter of coordination of the actions of different individuals by means of conventions, like deciding which side of the road to drive on, but a matter of considering people's capacities for flourishing and susceptibilities to harm and suffering. . . As social scientific spectators we tend to talk about behaviour in terms of what explains it, but as participants we tend to justify what we do, and implicitly invite others to accept or reject our justifications. (Sayer, 2011: 7–13)

In this vein, critical realism offers a highly accessible set of resources to degrowth. In a sense, critical realism presents as an ‘off the shelf’, easily understood, and highly plausible system of (ontologically focused) thought. This is especially so since these days some of its more difficult texts (see comment from Sayer, 2000; Price 2016) come ‘pre-interpreted’ – especially some of the later works of Roy Bhaskar – in the form of simplified selective works, such as Hubert Buch-Hansen and Peter Nielsen's Critical Realism: Basics and Beyond. However, ‘off the shelf’ brings with it the risk of mere acceptance of a body of work. An invitation to confirm is not an earned agreement. The basis of critical ethical naturalism, in particular, is the value in reasoning out a problem. The very process of reasoning is part of the point in regard of the cultivation of being. Realism is a guide in a complicated world of open system contingencies. It is not an answer.

To be clear, I by no means want to suggest there is a hypocrisy at the heart of critical realism, rather there can be an enthusiasm among those new to it and a tendency to think it constitutes a wholly original, transformative and self-contained set of answers. It really doesn’t and isn’t. This needs to be kept in mind in order to be approaching it mindfully. As long as this is done, its potential as a guide becomes a means to accelerate learning rather than a source of ‘quick-kill’ answers (that lack substance or proper understanding). This notwithstanding, it strikes me that most of the time what degrowth needs from critical realism is exactly the thing I’ve suggested warrants caution – an off the shelf, easily understood and highly plausible system of (ontologically focused) thought.

Unless its target is a disciplinary specific academic argument for oppositional purposes in philosophy or social theory, which is surely likely to be a tiny fraction of degrowth work (if degrowth is working), then critical realism's value to degrowth will mainly be judged in regard of what it offers in campaigning terms. ⁹ This is not to suggest critical realism does or should have mere pragmatic appeal and that it does not matter whether it is the best we have of its type in which we can vest some confidence. Clearly it does matter. But degrowth remains a movement, and for critical realism to matter to degrowth it cannot be merely a better argument, since oft times in the modern world the better argument does not succeed merely in virtue of being better (if it did ecological economics would have supplanted the existing mainstream years ago). All of which is to suggest that the simplicity of critical realism (which to be clear is distinct from simplistic), including critical ethical naturalism, is its greatest asset.

One might, for example, suggest it provides a candidate position to form part of an enduring and communicatively effective ‘framing’ of degrowth – addressing issues highlighted years ago by George Lakoff (2010) in his ‘Why it matters how we frame the environment’ (see also Bolton and Shapiro, 2018). If so, however, the challenge today seems greater than it was when Lakoff's article first appeared. The litany of problems in the world today is well-known. Opportunistic demagoguery abounds, influential political actors are prepared to undermine for short term gain the legitimacy of the institutions that they hold roles in, misinformation is enthusiastically consumed as fact and there is a ready audience prepared to believe conspiracy; bullies present as victims, grudge-grievance hatefulness is given free reign, free speech is espoused yet disagreement becomes designation of ‘enemies’ to be degraded, dehumanised, and silenced… All of this violates basic tenets of tolerance and recognition of common human dignity – a form of equality necessary to dialogue. We live in an era of angry-polycrisis-capitalism that seems antithetical to cultivation of being for the purposes of flourishing – and we have said nothing here regarding the profound asymmetries of material needs satisfaction and quality of life on a global basis.

Of course, one might argue that it is precisely in a crisis of the kind we find ourselves that well-founded alternatives have greater traction, a point stated for example:

The first prerequisite for socio-economic transformations is deep crisis… The second prerequisite for the degrowth vision to materialise is that it informs an alternative political project, based on which policymakers and other agents can interpret reality and act. (Buch-Hansen, Koch and Nesterova, 2024: 53–54)

With that in mind, a generic critical ethical naturalism within a simple exposition of critical realism is likely fit for degrowth purposes. It is an argument that encourages our better natures and can be entered into from variously inflected questions, contrasting how we are and how we could be:

Am I living my best life?

Are you living your best life?

Are we living our best lives?

There are many ways this questioning might be pursued (and though the questions might seem egocentric, they need not be, if our behaviour is other-regarding). One might, for example, use a role model approach (see, e.g. Nesterova, 2024, 2025), or more generally highlight the benefits of particular ways of acting and doing – drawing, for example, on Pierpaolo Donati and Margaret Archer's work on ‘relational goods’, whose value to us is the relation itself, its doing as being that can be intuitively grasped and practically demonstrated (Donati and Archer, 2015; Archer and Morgan, 2020). Alternatively, one might synthesise the case for massive redirection of resources into foundational goods, care services, and so on, with complementary argument regarding what is ‘good for’ the kind of being we are – perhaps orienting this with policy argument drawing on Sayer's moral economy approach in Why We Can’t Afford The Rich (Sayer, 2015; Morgan, 2022). Again, this is not to suggest the themes are currently alien to degrowth (see, e.g. DegrowthUK, 2024; and for context, Brand et al., 2021; Nelson 2022; Morgan 2024); but that is not the point. Nor is it to suggest one can decisively transform an industrialised consumerist economic system driven by accumulation with a few questions and a change of heart. There is clearly more to dismantling contemporary capitalism than that (again see Buch-Hansen, Koch and Nesterova, 2024). What a degrowth is ‘good for you’ argument offers (irrespective of whether critical realism is used to support it), is a strategy of persuasion that tempers the more fundamental case that continuing indefinitely with the kind of economies that currently dominate is impossible. Without degrowth as a means to transition to a postgrowth way of living, disaster looms, but bleak jeremiad rarely do more than invoke anxiety.

It should also be emphasised that critical realism offers a means to link the more fundamental case of necessity and the ethical aspect of argument in the form of explanatory critique (something I briefly alluded to in the introduction). Spash quotes Andrew Collier:

To say that some institution causes false beliefs is to criticise it. Given that (other things being equal) it is better to believe what is true than what is false, it is also better (other things being equal) that institutions that cause false beliefs should be replaced by, or transformed into, those that cause true ones. (Collier in Spash, 2024: 111)

Spash goes on to make the point that given there is often a ‘functional relationship between organisations that cause false beliefs and beliefs about those organisations… In such cases to propound the truth is not just to criticise, but to undermine the organisation and its institutional structure’ (Spash, 2024: 111). Concomitantly, values are inherent to social structure and are integral to identity and to reasons for acting as a social agent in given conditions. To know that the argument for growthism is false and to know that continuing indefinitely with the kind of economies that currently dominate is (disastrously) impossible, is to necessarily question the values that adhere to and justify that situation and, by extension, unless one allows a theory-practice inconsistency, provides a ‘moral imperative to act’ (Spash, 2024: 112; see also Spash, 2008, 2013, 2018). This brings us to a final issue.

Does it matter that critical realists disagree? The difference is in the detail versus the detail makes a difference …

Suggesting a generic critical realist ethical naturalism can be fit for (degrowth) purpose is apt to be misunderstood. It may be taken to imply that it is fit for all purposes and it may convey the impression that realism lacks significant disagreement on relevant matters. There are, for example, differences of emphasis and use of terminology. Both Bhaskar and Collier refer to themselves as moral realists and use the term ethical naturalism to refer to the epistemological approach required to explore the aspects of reality relevant to morality. For Sayer, ethical naturalism is understood as one among several theorisations of moral realism, a subset which holds that moral values are grounded in natural facts.

Whether disagreement matters, however, becomes more germane, when it is understood that critical ethical naturalism may speak to a ‘degrowth is good for you’ argument but is only a first step in orienting to environmental values (there is, e.g. scope for diversion of focus to the well-being economy and this can have quite a different meaning, see Buch-Hansen, 2025). Moreover, orienting on the flourishing of being and making the case that this aligns with doing less with less, slower by design, and community, cooperation and conviviality, can easily reduce to a socio-economic argument for why we should assent to a forced choice – and this could be framed as a hybrid procedural argument in a consequentialist context (and arguably this is where degrowth could easily land in increasingly urgent mass campaigning terms, especially if its success was to rapidly take it beyond those who came to it from within the various strands of eco-socialism, etc.). The need for smaller economies with balanced and sustainable metabolic flow may imply a different relationship to the biosphere, its ecosystems and species, but insofar as that change is a necessity, then changes of policy and ways of living need not stem from an argument that is founded differently in terms of environmental values. Clearly though, the need calls forth a differently founded environmental values (since utilitarian-instrumentalism and reduction of nature to securitised assets, exchange values, etc., are constitutive aspects of the causal mechanisms that have underpinned accumulation and growthism in a capitalist economy; for discussion, see Spash and Morgan, 2025). For critical ethical naturalism to contribute to and be compatible with different and progressive environmental values, the argument for who and what flourishing refers to requires not only extension but a reasoning out or legitimation of that extension. As readers are likely aware the standard extension is:

Those we do not know and have not met.

Those who have yet to be born.

Other species.

Ecosystems.

The extension, in turn, takes us to the territory of moral considerability and ‘intrinsic worth’ – which I briefly introduced previously. Now, I by no means wish to suggest this is new territory for eco/climate activists and academics or for readers of a journal titled Environmental Values, rather the point I want to make is that this is one of the weakest components of critical realism as is. It is a source of significant disagreement.

For example, Andrew Collier's Being and Worth (1999) provides the most developed argument within critical realism for the intrinsic worth of being and the well-known eco-socialist Ted Benton (who himself is author of one of realism's earliest works – Philosophical Foundations of the Three Sociologies; for discussion, see Benton and Morgan, 2025a) takes issue with the argument in an essay contributed to Collier's festschrift (Benton, 2004). Collier's argument broadly accords with the generic account of critical ethical naturalism previously given, but rather than drawing on Midgley et al., he combines aspects of the work of Spinoza, John Macmurray and St Augustine. Collier takes a cognitivist position and argues that ‘reason is implicit in all emotions’ and moral agency is a cognitive skill. Drawing on Spinoza and Macmurray, he argues that emotions are not just ‘blind urges’, rather they are engaged cognitive operations such that we have scope for rationally directed emotion, that is, our emotions can be more or less appropriate and adequate. Concomitantly, the cultivation of virtue and the exercise of moral agency rest on learning to act knowledgeably in the world. Here he makes the standard realist move that diversity, fallibility and corrigibility rest on ‘the nature of the emotions’ object’ and takes from this that there is independent (intrinsic) worth – a variant of St Augustine's ‘all being as being is good’. Having made this move, he addresses the problem of how to make moral choices if all being is good and does so by turning this problem into an issue of what conditions the order of priority of appropriate treatment. At this point in the argument he combines St Augustine and Spinoza. From St Augustine he takes the idea of hierarchy of being, placing sentient creatures at the top and inanimate things at the bottom, and he combines this with Spinoza's conatus (being struggles to continue in its existence) and suggests something can have more or less of this conatus-being: ¹⁰

That has more being which, in Spinoza's terms, has a more complex and articulated conatus towards being – which can more actively preserve and extend its being. This means interacting with more of nature – the objective aspect of being more and more conscious. We humans interact more with more of nature than do plants, which interact with more of nature than minerals, and so on. This seems like a basis for Augustine's ordering… [and to forestall misunderstandings] it should be clear from the fact that non-human and even non-living entities are good in the sense that I am using the word, that this sense is not the same as moral goodness. It could be called a pre-moral good in that morality is based on it. Morality presupposes ontological good and consists in loving in due order [while accepting that our sympathies may not be the same as the ordering – one might sympathise with a fox rather than a human who hunts a fox for sport, but ought still to treat a seriously injured fox hunter before a similarly injured fox]. (Collier, 1999: 77)

Benton (2004) is sympathetic to Collier's concerns but considers the arguments for both ‘all being is good being’ and for a hierarchy of that being, flawed. Benton notes that Collier's argument rests on a version of: it must be the case that being has intrinsic worth for it to be possible to be wrong in regard of one's assessment of its worth. However this, despite appearances, is a self-referential argument that does not establish whether worth is dependent on the perceiver who is active in a relationship with the object to which good is attributed or otherwise inheres in the object of perception (and the force of the argument rests on analogy to argument that worked for objects of experimental science but may not for intrinsic worth). Moreover, the case for hierarchy takes an argument that presupposes the divine and transposes it into a secular context and uses this to underpin superiority. From the point of view of modern evolutionary biology, this is a highly arguable move. One might also add that the claim of hierarchy is additionally (if not necessarily viciously) circular – advanced consciousness is required in order to be aware of and to assess worth, advanced conscious beings attribute greatest worth to advanced consciousness and act accordingly (which just happens to involve placing what is good for humans at the pinnacle of a hierarchy).

For Benton, Collier has not decisively overcome existing problems with the case for intrinsic worth. To be fair to Collier, however, his argument is more tentative than it appears in summary and he is quite aware of possible objections. Indeed, one of his motivations in writing Being and Worth was to address environmental ethics. He comments that his is a ‘theory of human beings as capable of becoming less anthropocentric, and as beings whose special destiny as rational beings is not to centre our values entirely on our own species…’ (Collier, 1999: 85). He goes on to suggest that ‘it is no accident that some of the best philosophical work on green issues comes from those with a realist epistemology and ontology’ and cites both John O’Neill's Ecology, Policy and Politics (1993) and Benton's Natural Relations (1993). O’Neill was Collier's colleague at Bangor University and friend thereafter. Collier had known Benton since their early days as part of the Radical Philosophy movement. In any case, for Collier, that there is an order of being does not imply that appropriate treatment reduces to place in a hierarchy (while one might choose the needs of a human over an animal, if one must choose, the torture of animals does not become acceptable merely by inferior place in a hierarchy, since appropriate treatment flows from the animal qua animal). Ultimately humans have a special duty as de facto ‘rulers of the Earth’, imposed by (emotive) rationality, to choose to act with appropriate care – superiority leads to a stewardship understanding of rule, and he goes on to suggest that some form of planning is a necessary but not sufficient condition for humans to ‘control the effects that we produce’.

Benton, meanwhile, while continuing to argue that there are basic problems of plausibility with a moral realism that depends on establishing intrinsic worth along the lines of ‘all being is good’, suggests we might instead opt for a generalised ‘need-respecting moral framework’. This places its emphasis on moral considerability but does not depend explicitly on strong claims about moral realism. For Benton, its attraction is that it focuses on ‘protecting the conditions (i.e., habitat) necessary for non-human animals to meet their needs – or to ‘flourish’ in the myriad ways appropriate to the ‘mode of life’ of each species’ (see Benton and Morgan 2025b). This, one might note, is an argument that can be made in tandem with Kate Soper's work on relations with nature as ‘life-enhancing’ (see, e.g. Soper, 2020).

To be clear, the point of this example is not to establish who has, if anyone has, the better argument (though Steve Ash, 2022: 133–152, thinks there may be a way forward) but rather to highlight that realists reasonably disagree. The follow-on question for degrowth is whether such disagreement matters. Well, both Collier and Benton are (were) in agreement that while the debate continues realist positions demand urgent action be taken to implement degrowth. More generally, whether disagreement matters for given cases depends on where disagreement lies and what it suggests – whether the difference is in the detail (and is restricted to the detail) or whether the details make a difference to the general case and thus to the confidence vested in a generic version of argument. This seems something of an open question, but not one that prevents realism being of service to degrowth.

In any case, even if we gloss over the disagreements (and I could have also discussed Dave Elder-Vass's objections), those realists Collier draws attention to – Benton and O’Neill – both emphasise in their work that even if intrinsic worth is accepted, it does not provide a clear guide regarding what to do. ¹¹ In Environmental Values, for example, O’Neill, Holland and Light (2008) argue that while cultivation of character may matter in various ways, taking responsibility requires an institutional (rather than merely individual) location and the possibility of good public decisions flows from a procedural/deliberative framework in which a plurality of values and choices can be brought together and aired. ¹² As such, a generic critical realist ethical naturalism may have ‘off the shelf’ value to degrowth, but, switching (parochial) metaphors, it is no more than a ‘starter for ten’. ¹³

Conclusion

I have argued that a critical realist generic critical ethical naturalism offers degrowth a resource that supports the ‘good for you’ aspect of the project. A significant part of its attraction here is that it offers counters to subjectivism and does so within a broader ontology that adds additional credence to ethical stances. However, a phrase such as ‘what critical realism offers degrowth’ is apt to give the impression that critical realism is in some sense profoundly oriented to degrowth concerns. This is not true. Critical realism has diffused across the social sciences and many of those working with it have limited professional understanding of or interest in climate emergency and ecological breakdown. They are just getting on with their (academic) lives. In a sense, this is a situation similar to that regarding ecological economics and heterodox economics. Both may share an open systems ontology, but it has not prevented some heterodox economists (who consider themselves progressive) continuing to work on and advocate for growth. In the case of critical realists though, if adherents are consistent with its tenets, then exposure to evidence regarding the problem of growthism ought to make them converts to degrowth (writ large as a campaigning project for a postgrowth world). This is a prima facie case for dialogue in which critical realists have much to learn and there are various voices who warrant our attention – some of whom are critical realists active in degrowth. If we adopt a memorable phrasing from Buch-Hansen and Nielsen (2023: 359), we need a ‘progressive spiral of sustainability’.