Freedom and Nature

Abstract

Spinoza offers a way to contest the view that we can only deal with environmental risks by giving up a significant degree of freedom. Unlike other defenders of the republican conception of liberty, he argues that we can be made unfree by non-human things such as viruses or weather-patterns. Insofar as we are subject to their arbitrary power, we are already in a condition of servitude. If we adopt this Spinozist diagnosis of our condition, the problem we confront is not so much whether we are willing to give up existing freedoms as whether we can find the means to overcome a lack of freedom that is arguably more destructive than we generally recognize.