Sir
Matthew Hale is frequently
credited with a key role in establishing the public trust doctrine in modern
environmental law—a claim that has been contested
by multiple scholars on the basis of both the legal relevance to American
law and whether his claims for public rights in De Jure Maris can be
taken as a statement of public trust at all. Whatever Hale’s relationship to
public trust doctrine as a principle of law, however, his religious writings
show that he relied upon legal metaphors of trusts and stewardship as the basis
for moral arguments for the human obligation to care for their
environment. References to human stewardship were not uncommon in religious
writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but Hale elaborates on the
moral implications of the steward’s fiduciary role in a more extensive and
legally detailed way than most, emphasizing the human obligation to account to
the proprietary “lord,” God, for the responsible and proper use of that which
has been entrusted to them.
In
a chapter in his posthumously published Contemplations Moral and Divine
entitled “The
Great Audit, with the Account of the Good Steward,” Hale uses the Book of
Matthew’s parable of the talents to imagine God calling humans to “account” for
their use of the “blessings and talents” that God “committed to [their] trust
and stewardship, to manage … for they ends they were given.” While the
“blessings and talents” Hale discusses are broad and comprehensive, he gives
special attention to the implications of human beings’ “stewardship” of
creation for their duties to nonhuman creatures. In the section subtitled
“Touching Thy Creatures,” Hale writes: “I received and used thy creatures as
committed to me under a Trust, and as a Steward and Accomptent for them; and
therefore I was always careful to use them according to those Limits, and in
order for those Ends, for which thou didst commit them to me.” Hale frames the
“Limits” to human control in terms of justice: God “has given us a Dominion
over thy Creatures, yet it is under a Law of Justice, Prudence, and
Moderation; otherwise we should become Tyrants, not Lords.” That “Law of
Justice” requires using the nonhuman world with “Temperance and Moderation,”
for the “Support of the Exigencies” of human life, yet with “Mercy and
Compassion” for the “Powers of Life and Sense” which non-humans possess. To
fail in either temperance or compassion would constitute a “Breach of that
Trust under which the Dominion of the Creatures was committed to us, and a
Breach of that Justice that is due from Men … to be merciful to [their]
Beasts.” Cruelty and mistreatment of other creatures is therefore “a Tyranny
inconsistent with the Trust and Stewardship that thou [God] has committed” to
humans.
Thus
Hale imagines a contractual relationship existing among God, humans, and
non-humans, making humans morally responsible for the well-being of present and
future generations of beings. Though Hale, like any contemporary moralist,
stresses the sinfulness of the “Luxury and Excess … Lusts … vain Glory or
Ostentation” that spur humans to mistreat and misuse the non-human creatures in
their power, for him the fundamental sin is the violation of man’s fiduciary
duties as God’s steward. Thus using creatures to excess is not simply a sin of
personal gluttony. It breaks the terms under which God granted humans their
limited dominion, by (in this case, literally) eating into God’s resources:
whenever eating or drinking, Hale says, “I checked myself, … still remembered I
had thy Creatures under an Accompt; and was ever careful to avoid excess or
Intemperance, because every excessive Cup and Meal was in Danger to leave me
somewhat Insuper and Arrear to my Lord.” The sin of mis- or over-use of God’s
creatures, for Hale, lies in the violation of the contract between man and God
to care for his creation according to the stipulated terms, and the failure to
maintain God’s creation as a steward ought, by taking more from it than can be
sustained. Hale believes the power granted to humans as the stewards of the
world to be by its very nature subject to a law whose primary purpose is to
ensure that justice and happiness is, overall, extended to each creature. That
is, after all, the rationale that licenses human sovereignty over the world:
that they maintain God’s ideal balance among the competing needs of various
creatures for the optimal happiness of all. Only by justly fulfilling the
duties laid out for them by God can humans legitimately claim “dominion” over
the nonhuman world.
It
makes sense for Hale to rely on the language of law and justice to reinforce
moral obligations, since as biographer
Alan Cromartie points out, Hale’s legal philosophy was based upon the
premise of a legislating God who was “the basis of all natural moral
knowledge,” as well as the premise that “the rule that all contracts should be
kept was much the most important natural law.” In this, Hale was a part of a
longstanding tradition of contractarian natural law, which drew moral
principles from the nature of the fundamental contract between God the creator
and his creations. Not all those who shared Hale’s belief that human beings
were the trustees and stewards of God’s gifts extended their obligations to
nonhuman creatures, but there is reason to believe that his opinions on that
subject had a long and lasting influence on English morality, if not law: “The
Great Audit” was excerpted, condensed, and reprinted regularly as a pamphlet
from the 1690s to the 1790s, and the sub-section “Touching Thy Creatures” was
the longest of the eight sub-sections included in those condensed editions,
taking up five of a total of around twenty-five pages.
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