Beyond fairness: the COVID-19 pandemic as an expression of environmental injustice

ABSTRACT

The paper sets out to explore the significance of the concept of environmental justice for a critical study of the Covid-19 pandemic. This task involves questioning the prevailing equation of justice with fairness, the limits of which have become manifest during the pandemic. In its place, a more holistic conceptualization is required, which registers the material environment as a constitutive dimension of the actuality of justice. It is toward such a holistic conceptualization that environmental justice discourse points. Yet, to fully meet its critical potential, the notion of environmental justice needs to widen its scope beyond problems of unequal distribution and disproportionate exposure of disenfranchized groups. Moreover, it must confront its own distributional logic, which ends up reducing the concept's potency and actuality to an ethical judgment on the current state of the world, whose failure to live up to a set ideal is seen as leading to environmental disaster. This critical confrontation will be accomplished through a materialist theorization of justice as a diagrammatic process of environment-making. Looking at the Covid-19 pandemic through this theoretical lens, it will be conceived as an ‘ethological accident’, which expresses in its very contingency an injustice that is integral to capitalist environments.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental justice
• fairness
• Covid-19
• epidemics
• inequality
• normativity
• diagrammatics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For two excellent elaborations of this theoretical principle through reference to nineteenth century epidemics, see Davis (2001); De Waal (2020).

2 It should be stressed that the analysis is not a detailed critique of Rawlsian theory, as much as a diagnosis of some key ramifications entailed in the identification of justice with fairness. Rawls himself was aware that there are problematic parameters in this identification; in fact, as his thought developed there is a recognizable shift to a more historically grounded theorization (see Azmanova 2012, 77–82). Still, insofar the identification of justice with fairness was kept intact, his thought arguably remains logged to the distributional paradigm.

3 I owe the notion of an ‘engineering’, rather than merely representational, diagram to Manuel De Landa (2001), himself developing Deleuzian diagrammatics.

4 The concept of the ‘growth machine’ is taken from Harvey Molotch (1976), who used it for urban renewal. Here not only its reference is expanded, the concept is given a more literal bent, along the lines sketched by Deleuze and Guattari: the ‘growth machine’ is not a metaphor, it is a real energy-producing and energy-consuming assemblage of operations, which (trans)forms environments and makes them fecund for capital valorization.

5 This distinction, it should be noted in passing, encompasses ‘labor’, which allows ‘Man’ to extract Value from ‘Nature’. Wouldn’t that mean that an abolition of the axiological hierarchy between intellectual and manual labour, signposted by Marx as an essential aspect of communism, implies an abolition of the axiological hierarchy between Mind and Matter, hence, Man and Nature?.

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George Sotiropoulos

George Sotiropoulos currently teaches at the International School of Athens, where he also serves as Head of the Social Studies department. His research interests and published work cover a wide range of themes, from the ontological turn of political theory to current social movements and the history of revolutions. In recent years he has focused on the concept of justice, exploring the possibility and scope of a materialist theorization. Having completed a postdoctoral research on spatial justice as a Visiting Researcher at the Department of Political Science and International Relations of the University of Peloponnese, he is currently exploring the potential contribution of such materialist conceptualization of justice to a critical genealogy of the unfolding socio-ecological crisis. His most recent publications are A Materialist Theory of Justice: The One, the Many, the Not-Yet, Rowman and Littlefield International, 2019 (paperback edition, 2021) and ‘Between Order and Insurgency: Post-structuralism and the problem of justice’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2021.