Make Love, Not Carbon
The ethical, individual approach to mitigating anthropogenic climate change is limited
by Amanda Machin
Be ethical, we are told. Be green. Recycle your waste, take public transport, change your light bulbs. Climate change is infiltrating our everyday life through the imperatives of green ethics that holler from the lifestyle pages of magazines, from the mouths of the celebrities, and from the printed slogans of reusable bags that are not plastic bags.
These individual gestures, presumably, are supposed to amass into a colossal coordinated movement to counter climate change. But can they really do that? What do these eco-ethical imperatives tell us about ourselves?
The approach to climate change that I examine in this chapter is one that regards it as a symptom of a deeply unethical tendency in our current ways of living. Here climate change is an ethical matter, something that requires a transformation in the norms and values of human societies. Advocates of this sort of perspective suggest, quite correctly, that technological innovation and market mechanisms do not constitute, by themselves, an adequate response to climate change, and that a more radical structural shift is demanded. They comprehend both the problem of climate change and its solution through an ethical framework; it is a transformation not of our economics and technology but of our ethics that is demanded. Climate change is not a problem to be managed, but an issue through which we can identify the deeper structural flaws of our ways of life, and through which we can become good individuals.
The common governmental tactic of handing over responsibility to science, economics or a combination of the two will indeed not provoke the social shift and collective actions necessary to address climate change. But the ‘ethical-individual approach’ running alongside this ‘techno-economic’ one, is also flawed. Although an ethical analysis of climate change reveals important concepts and trends, and forces us to examine previously unexamined values and behavior, the problem with understanding climate change as solely or primarily a matter of ethics is that it advocates and reproduces a globalization and individualization of responsibility. This dual trajectory makes responsibility both universal and personal. It disregards political communities and identities, and leaves it up to individuals to decide when and how to act.
Climate change is not a problem to be managed, but an issue through which we can identify the deeper structural flaws of our ways of life, and through which we can become good individuals.
This portrait of the human individual actually replicates—from another angle, as it were—the one painted by the techno-economic school. In this picture, each individual is again presupposed to have access to one ‘rational’ perspective through which the problem can be assessed. But if we understand humans to hold many diverse ethical perspectives, then to expect these perspectives to translate and harmonize into one unified movement is surely not feasible. This approach mistakenly presupposes, first, that the actions of countless individuals will be coordinated into some sort of harmonious green movement to save the planet. Second, it can result in the depiction of those who don’t fulfill their supposedly ethical environmental duties as morally bad. Thus it precludes collective responses to tackling climate change, both by assuming that ethical alignment of people around the world is feasible, and then by excluding those who don’t align themselves.
Ethics can be defined both as ‘an activity of thinking’ and as ‘a set of values which guide an individual or group in their behavior’. ‘What ought I to do?’ and ‘How should we live?’ are ethical questions, which indicate considerations beyond self-interest. Thus an ethical approach to climate change highlights the values that condition our attitudes towards our environment and our responses to environmental harm, and simultaneously reflects upon these values. The terms ‘ethical’ and ‘moral’ are often used interchangeably, but I have chosen to use the former. Whereas morality is understood to consist of universal principles and rules, ethics (as I use the term here) is about human values in a particular context. As the context is climate change, I regard the present debate about values as an ethical rather than a moral one.
Various theorists and activists lament the lack of ethical discussion about climate change, for they insist that climate change is essentially an ethical issue. They explain that although the attention of other disciplines is welcome and important for considering the issue, ultimately the judgements about whether and how climate change should be tackled need ethical reflection which cannot be substituted by economic or scientific assessment. The philosopher Stephen Gardiner, for example, points out that just recognizing climate change as a problem requires an ethical perspective. He asserts that the issue demands greater engagement of moral philosophy: ‘climate change poses some difficult ethical and philosophical problems. Partly as a consequence of this, the public and political debate surrounding climate change is often simplistic, misleading, and awash with conceptual confusion. Moral philosophers should see this as a call to arms.’
Like Gardiner, Dale Jamieson believes that the ethical assumptions and ideas in the background of the climate change debate need bringing to the fore. Jamieson points out that the disagreement between Stern and Nordhaus is not really a quarrel over economic reckoning but is rather a disagreement about values. The two economists discount the future differently in their calculations, which means, in short, that they disagree about how the interests of future generations should be weighed against those of present generations.
Jamieson explains that this dispute is clearly a dispute about ethical values. He points out that climate change raises unavoidable ethical questions: ‘questions about who we are, our relations to nature, and what we are willing to sacrifice for various possible futures’. Thus the ‘management’ approach that narrowly restricts itself to economics cannot provide the answers: ‘We should confront this as a fundamental challenge to our values and not treat it as if it were simply another technical problem to be managed.’
For Jamieson, by failing to prioritise the environment in the decisions we make, we damage ourselves. Climate change, then, is identified as the symptom of a fundamental flaw in our current human existence, a crisis that demands a radical transformation in our way of life and in our ethical perspectives. The tackling of climate change is not only about saving the environment, since it would also foster human integrity and wholeness: ‘Developing a deeper understanding of who we are, as well as how our best conceptions of ourselves can guide change, is the fundamental issue that we face.’
Jamieson claims that the obstacle to proper thought and action about global environmental issues is the dominant set of values, inherited from philosophers who lived in a very different era. Our current value system, he explains, arose in an era of low population density and low technology, and is not suitable for today’s changed world. The particular understanding of responsibility found in this system is based on the idea that a harm usually has an obvious and specific cause and therefore assigning responsibility or blame is a straightforward matter. But this model of responsibility, he explains, doesn’t work for a complex issue in which cause and effect are remote: ‘what we need are new values that reflect the interconnectedness of life on a dense, high-technology planet’.
Since climate change is caused by the innocent acts of countless individuals, and the harms will mainly be manifested in the future, it is difficult to blame any persons in particular. This doesn’t fit with our normal perspective of an ‘urgent moral problem’. Unless we promote a different understanding of responsibility, no one will feel obligated to tackle climate change, and our responses will be wholly inadequate. We need a revision of our everyday understanding of responsibility.
This call for a transformation of our value system and specifically for a new conception of responsibility is echoed by other thinkers.
Peter Singer agrees that our current way of thinking needs an overhaul to reflect the fact that the environment can no longer be understood as an unlimited resource, and that responsibility for environmental harm is not easy to assign. As he puts it, ‘the twin problems of the ozone hole and of climate change have revealed bizarre new ways of killing people. By driving your car you could be releasing carbon dioxide that is part of a causal chain leading to lethal floods in Bangladesh…. How can we adjust our ethics to take account of this new situation?’
Nigel Dower lists climate change along with various other issues that necessitate a new ‘global ethic’ which includes trans-boundary obligations: ‘The problems of the world, such as absolute poverty, conflict, environmental degradation, climate change, refugees and human rights abuses, require of individuals and states a new sense of global responsibility.’
These theorists draw crucial attention to the challenges and confusions in thinking ethically about global environmental problems. However the new conceptions of environmental ethics they call for are generally characterized by both a globalization and an individualization of responsibility.
States and political institutions are not burdened by ethical responsibility; in a cosmopolitan move, the state is overlooked and responsibility for climate change is handed to individuals. The burden is place upon the good individual to tackle climate change by carrying out what Michael Maniates calls ‘small, individual eco-actions’ such as recycling, swapping light bulbs and buying a bike. But this detracts attention from political movements and collective actions.
Without political collectives and institutions through which demands for larger, more sustained action can be channelled, individualized conceptions of ethical responsibility can only go so far in actually implementing change. Despite its calls for a radical structural change by individualizing responsibility, the ethical response is impotent when it comes to instituting it. What this approach does execute effectively, however, is to discriminate between human individuals as ethically ‘good’ and ‘bad’; as worthy or wrong, green or greedy.
This is an extract from Amanda Machin’s “Negotiating Climate Change”, published by Zed Books.
