摘要：How one views the relationship between human beings and the environment may seem to be an issue remote from more pressing human concerns for social justice and political stability. The connections, however, are essential and significant. Our pursuit of justice and our need to reverse the patterns of behavior so damaging to the environment are intimately related. That human conduct toward the environment needs to be changed is one of the main tenets of thinkers and activists who characterize the current state of human impact on the environment as an ecological crisis. What we hear is a call for radical change in the thoughtless and destructive patterns of human consumption by the 20% of the worldʼs population that uses 80% of the worldʼs resources. But all too often, we fail to see the relevance of this environmental issue to the other ethical issues that also rightly demand our attention and so move it to the periphery of our moral vision. In this presentation, I want to call attention to the way Plato connects environmental sustainability to social justice and political stability in the first two books of the Republic. He addresses elements that are central to environmental sustainability that are tightly integrated to social justice and political stability. I will examine the way in which Plato develops this view and defend it against several criticisms. We will see that his view amounts to the strong claim that any just society will be environmentally sustainable. This is true whether the conception of justice like Platoʼs based on justice as a virtue of a person or on justice as a property of a political institution. Correspondingly, we will conclude environmental sustainability alone is not enough to ensure that solutions to environmental problems are just.
