Moral Concern and Earthcare
How Can We Make People Care About Climate Change?
Norwegian psychologist Per Espen Stoknes has studied why so many people have remained unconcerned abou
t climate change. In a Yale Environment 360 interview, he talks about the psychological barriers to public action on climate and how to overcome them.
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/how_can_we_make_people_care_about_climate_change/2892/
“What we know from psychological studies is that if you overuse fear-inducing imagery, what you get is fear and guilt in people, and this makes people more passive, which counteracts engagement. This includes creativity as well. If you give people a guilt or fear-inducing message and then ask them to solve a problem that requires creative thought, there is a statistically significant reduction in the amount of creativity that people come up with to formulate solutions.”
I want to link this article up with my own work. Because I do emphasise agency, meaning, will and values in a participatory and creative universe.
I work in the tradition of virtue ethics and am developing the notion of ecological virtue. You can call the virtues qualities for successful/sustainable living, and such qualities are to be defined in terms of the ecological conditions for human and planetary flourishing. If that sounds arcane or abstruse think of it in these terms, our current form of socialisation is concerned with shaping people to be producers geared to the endless accumulation of material quantities and consumers forever running on the hedonistic treadmill. The truth is that the vices of endless production – production for the sake of production, accumulation of means for the sake of means is without end and is a nihilism - and overconsumption are undermining the social and ecological bases of civilised life. Back in 1976 Fred Hirsch warned about the social and ethical limits to growth, alongside the ecological limits.
SOCIAL LIMITS TO GROWTH
https://zielonygrzyb.wordpress.com/2012/01/22/social-limits-to-growth/
“Generally speaking, it is important to get people to behave more “socially”… However, for this to be feasible, there must exist some basic amount of social norms and conventions that guarantee that people can to a certain extent “predict” what others are likely to do (or trust them). Hirsch calls this “a shift in the invisible hand from the private into the public or communal sector”. The problem of social scarcity hasn’t disappeared in the meantime ... there are signs that it has become worse. Therefore, the concluding sentence of Hirsch’s books remains important:
“For the overriding economic problem discussed in this book, the first necessity is not technical devices but the public acceptance necessary to make them work.”
“We are discovering, a little late in the day it must be admitted, the truth of Hirsh’s thesis that capitalism only functions well when most people live according to pre-capitalist norms of honesty, restraint, trust, truthfulness and self-sacrifice. A world of rational gratification maximizers is discovering that our individually rational choices can quickly add up to collective self-destruction.”
(If everyone stands on tiptoe, no one sees better: Social Limits to Growth Revisited)
http://umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/departments/philosophy/ethics/media/social_limits_to_growth.pdf
All of which begs the question of how to create the ‘happy habitus’ (eudaimonia = flourishing) which enables us to acquire and exercise the virtues, construct the right character, develop the right habits and create capabilities. And practise what Carolyn Merchant called Earthcare, in her book of the same title from 1996.
Within prevailing social relations, there is no necessary connection between the individual/private good and the social/ecological/public good. That means that the common good is something abstract and that all appeals to such a good are lacking in social relevance; they presume a social identity that does not exist. The kind of identity presupposed by the modern market society within which we live is that of the self-interested individual whose own good may well be achieved in ways detrimental to the overall social and ecological good. Any overall good that may result from such self-interested behaviour is indirect. To demand that such an individual serve the common good and live the virtuous life is to expect an altruism which, within prevailing social relations, is irrational, a sacrifice of a tangible and immediate individual self-interest for a vague and intangible general interest. The result, though, is that individual freedom and reason generates a collective unfreedom and unreason (call it the crisis in the climate system and looming eco-catastrophe). As social beings, our lives are governed by collective forces. The problem is that we lack appropriate mechanisms of collective control capable of governing those forces. We require a social identity that establishes a direct connection between individual and social good so that responding to appeals to the common good would indeed be rational and require no irrational sacrifice of self-interest. An identity of this kind is not available within the instrumental market relations upon which society is patterned. Here, individual identity is constituted by abstraction, and the good is defined in terms of private acquisition and enjoyment. Such identity is the polar opposite of the identity given by participation in the politics and culture of the public life we need in order to be ourselves.
THE PROBLEM OF COLLECTIVE ACTION
The philosopher Georges Canguilhem argued that social organization "is the solution to the problem of converting competition into compatibility" (Canguilhem 1994: 330). "At every stage there is the threat of mutiny, of rebellious individualism that might destroy the collective spirit." (Matt Ridley 1996). The problem is easily enough stated, but difficult to resolve - how do we reconcile the freedom of individuals as social beings within a form or forms of the common life that recognise individuality and sociality as two sides of the same human coin. In my view, we need to move the problem out of the field of logic and into the practical, social realm. The “voter paradox” shows why. Way back in 1785 by Marie-Jean-Antoine Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, demonstrated that we are unable to make a coherent generalization with respect to the transition from individual preferences to a collective preference (Condorcet [1785]).
Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de. [1785] 1973. Essai sur I'Application de I'Analyse a la Probabilite des Decisions Rendues a la Pluralite des Voix. Facsimile Reprint of 1785 edition. Bronx, N.Y.: Chelsea.
In “the Voter Paradox” there are three electors who make a choice between three candidates, A, B, and C. We may expect individual preferences to generate a clear group preference in this case, as a majority of two out of three votes, but things are not so simple. Three electors choosing from three candidates could generate a majority order of preferences that is circular, as follows:
A > B > C.
B > C > A.
C > A > B.
There is a two to one preference for A over B, but also for B over C, and C over A. Individual preference fails to generate a stable general preference, only the circular A > B > C > A. On the basis of this logic, the voter paradox generates a collective order of preferences that is incoherent.
Kenneth Arrow, Nobel Prize—winning economist, generalized this result by demonstrating that no function will lead from a collection of individual preferences to a coherent collective preference if we satisfy the condition of independence of irrelevant alternatives (Arrow 1964).
Arrow, Kenneth Joseph. 1964. Social Choice and Individual Values. 2nd ed. New York: Wiley.
At this point, I lose patience with logic, and the assumptions built into such reasoning, and instead switch to social action. When we treat philosophical problems as sociological problems, the impasse is broken. I would argue that we need to get beyond the false dualism of methodological individualism and methodological holism if we are to resolve the problem of the logic of collective action. We need to transcend the limitations of rational choice and notions of self-interested individual choosers and instead establish the collective mechanisms that recognise individuality and sociality as two integral aspects of creative human self-realisation. The ‘self’ in this sense is species wide and not merely individual. The problem with game theory and rational choice is that it assumes the very thing that is problematic – the motives of each individual player. That’s fine in a poker game. But in face of the social and ecological crises which threaten the very basis of civilised existence, we need to forge new motives. And that, I argue, requires a transformed social context so that an inherent disposition to evolve co-operative strategies emerges from within social relationships.
My work in philosophy is concerned to reconstruct a tradition and a concept of 'rational freedom' around principles of reciprocity, mutual respect, communication, communality, solidarity. The 'rational' here goes further than the individualism of rational choice and instead comprehends subjectivity as an intersubjectivity, seeking to secure the unity of the freedom of each and the freedom of all within an ethical and social matrix. This tradition rejects the atomistic model of freedom, seeing unrestricted individual choice and the unregulated pursuit of self-interest not as an expression of individual freedom but as a mutual self-cancellation.
Marx writes well here in the Grundrisse:
“It has been said and may be said that this is precisely the beauty and the greatness of it: this spontaneous interconnection, this material and mental metabolism which is independent of the knowing and willing of individuals, and which presupposes their reciprocal independence and indifference. And, certainly, this objective connection is preferable to the lack of any connection, or to a merely local connection resting on blood ties, or on primeval, natural or master-servant relations. Equally certain is it that individuals cannot gain mastery over their own social interconnections before they have created them. But it is an insipid notion to conceive of this merely objective bond as a spontaneous, natural attribute inherent in individuals and inseparable from their nature (in antithesis to their conscious knowing and willing). This bond is their product. It is a historic product. It belongs to a specific phase of their development. The alien and independent character in which it presently exists vis-a-vis individuals proves only that the latter are still engaged in the creation of the conditions of their social life, and that they have not yet begun, on the basis of these conditions, to live it. It is the bond natural to individuals within specific and limited relations of production. Universally developed individuals, whose social relations, as their own communal [gemeinschaftlich] relations, are hence also subordinated to their own communal control, are no product of nature, but of history. The degree and the universality of the development of wealth where this individuality becomes possible supposes production on the basis of exchange values as a prior condition, whose universality produces not only the alienation of the individual from himself and from others, but also the universality and the comprehensiveness of his relations and capacities. In earlier stages of development the single individual seems to be developed more fully, because he has not yet worked out his relationships in their fullness, or erected them as independent social powers and relations opposite himself. It is as ridiculous to yearn for a return to that original fullness as it is to believe that with this complete emptiness history has come to a standstill. The bourgeois viewpoint has never advanced beyond this antithesis between itself and this romantic viewpoint, and therefore the latter will accompany it as legitimate antithesis up to its blessed end.” (Marx Gr 1973:163/6).
The pursuit of individual self-interest and exercise of individual rational choice thus generate a collective unfreedom and irrationality that inhibits individual freedom:
“In the money relation, in the developed system of exchange (and this semblance seduces the democrats), the ties of personal dependence, of distinctions of blood, education, etc. are in fact exploded, ripped up (at least, personal ties all appear as personal relations); and individuals seem independent (this is an independence which is at bottom merely an illusion, and it is more correctly called indifference), free to collide with one another and to engage in exchange within this freedom; but they appear thus only for someone who abstracts from the conditions, the conditions of existence within which these individuals enter into contact (and these conditions, in turn, are independent of the individuals and, although created by society, appear as if they were natural conditions, not controllable by individuals). The definedness of individuals, which in the former case appears as a personal restriction of the individual by another, appears in the latter case as developed into an objective restriction of the individual by relations independent of him and sufficient unto themselves.”
“These external relations are very far from being an abolition of 'relations of dependence'; they are rather the dissolution of these relations into a general form; they are merely the elaboration and emergence of the general foundation of the relations of personal dependence. Here also individuals come into connection with one another only in determined ways. These objective dependency relations also appear, in antithesis to those of personal dependence (the objective dependency relation is nothing more than social relations which have become independent and now enter into opposition to the seemingly independent individuals; i.e. the reciprocal relations of production separated from and autonomous of individuals) in such a way that individuals are now ruled by abstractions, whereas earlier they depended on one another. The abstraction, or idea, however, is nothing more than the theoretical expression of those material relations which are their lord and master.” (Marx Gr N1 1973: 165).
There are many who are inclined to look away whenever the name of Karl Marx is mentioned. I would argue that they need to give serious consideration to his words here. But if this is still too much to ask from the brave soldiers of social and environmental reform, similar arguments can be found being made by impeccably conservative thinkers. The great Christian writer C.S. Lewis wrote this:
“Man's conquest of nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on man's side. Each power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows in the triumphal car.” (C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man 1947).
Compare Lewis’ argument to Marx’s view:
‘Not the gods, not nature, but only man himself can be this alien power over men.’(Marx EW EPM 1975). It’s the same argument. And it can be found being advanced by the great conservative philosopher Edmund Burke, who wrote:
'Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetites. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there is without.'
(Social control and self-mediation vs alien control and external mediation is a central theme of my work. See, for instance, Social Self-Determination versus Alien Controlhttps://www.academia.edu/787991/Social_Self-Determination_versus_Alien_Control).
The point is that the less self-restraint we are able to give ourselves through the right character, virtues or habits, what Alexis de Tocqueville called the ‘habits of the heart’, the mores of society, the more we will be compelled to rely upon external restraint in the form of laws, regulations, police, surveillance and any number of other intrusions into personal life. This indeed perfectly describes the emergence of the panopticon society, the administered society, the carceral society criticised by social thinkers from Horkheimer and Adorno to Foucault. As we have shed restraints in equating freedom with the right of individuals to do as they choose, we have lost the idea of a shared moral code voluntarily enforced, through character construction and identification with a larger reason, and instead see the unifying purpose as identified with law enforcement agencies. Society becomes less open and more administered as a result.
In my current work, I argue not only for a recovery of virtue ethics, but for its extension as a conception of ecological virtue. This alone is insufficient, creating just another socially impotent and irrelevant ethic to join the club of warring gods in the modern world. We are not short of competing moralities, value judgements with no claim on society other than personal preference. The attempt to rework an ethic of virtue can only succeed if the context has been created to enable the social identity required by that ethic, a social identity which connects individual self-interest and the social interest. Only such a social identity serves to check the problem of the free rider. Without that identity, there is no connection between individual action and overall good, something which inhibits the individual from engaging in action for the greater good.
Moral exhortation extolling the virtues of altruism provides insufficient motive to inspire altruistic actions. That is, whilst many will agree that altruistic behaviour is good, they will, within a market society of instrumental relations, lack good reason to act altruistically. Working for the social good will entail a sacrifice of self-interest which will be deemed irrational. The social identity connecting self- and social interest is not available and stands in need of creation. Only then will appeals to altruism and the common good become effective. Only with the creation of such a social identity can we rework the ethic of virtue in a way that avoids the nostalgic frame. A virtuous social identity conceives well-being, what Aristotle calls 'eudaimonia', in interpersonal terms, the individual good being directly related to the contribution that the individual makes to the social good. The appeal to altruism and the common good is effective only in the context of such a social identity. The antithesis between egoism and altruism is overcome so that to pursue the one entails no sacrifice of the other. Rousseau writes well on the need to establish reciprocal relations between each individual and all individuals: ‘The undertakings which bind us to the social body are obligatory only because they are mutual; and their nature is such that in fulfilling them we cannot work for others without working for ourselves.’ (Rousseau Social Contract 1973: II.iv).
In the context of a society organised around such a social identity, the appropriate morality is one concerned with the excellence of character or virtue. Individuals learn how to live well in everyday reciprocal relation to others, and in doing what they need to do to live well as individuals, they work also for others, sustaining the social fabric and political order to which they belong.
With a social identity that connects individual and social good, the commitment to the precepts and practices of a common moral and institutional framework become effective. The individual can see how his or her individual actions impact on the wider environment and generate results. I argue that the moral foundation for such a social identity exists in a conception of human beings as social and natural beings possessing potentialities for healthy growth, a conception which implies certain irrevocable standards or self-evident truths concerning what it is to be truly human.
And this explains why I work in the tradition of virtue theory, developing a conception of ecological virtue so that people come to want to do the things they must do in order to flourish well. This is not about appeals to reason, evidence and morals but a (co)responsiveness that works through character construction. Virtues are different from know-how, skills and abilities but engage the will and motivate action. Knowledge in itself is not a virtue; to be a virtue it would need to have an appetitive component. Knowledge would be a virtue in the proper sense if it made an agent positively desire to grasp the true. But this is not the case. Having knowledge doesn’t necessarily make a person want to consider the truth, just able to do so.
The knowledge and ability with respect to climate change have been there for quite a while now. What is lacking is the will, character, appetite, motivation, all set within a specific social identity connection immediate individual good and long range collective good. Action on the part of individuals in favour of justice presumes a consciousness of justice as a moral duty, and a willingness and a capacity to act on that awareness. For this reason, both reason and emotion must be involved, and the cognitive and the affective aspects of human action integrated. If morality without effective action is impotent, so action without purpose and meaning cannot endure. We need to create the habitus which enables us to acquire and exercise the virtues. This a long term project. The problem is that the crisis in the climate system has very much put the focus on effective short-term actions if we are to even have the possibility of a long term. For me, that loss of a future is the price to be paid for the loss of the virtues in the first place.
As economist John Maynard Keynes wrote “Modern capitalism is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers.” Keynes, indeed, encapsulates the ambivalence of modernity. Distinguishing needs from wants, Keynes looked at the progress of modern technique and organisation and concluded in the 1930s that the time is coming when everybody would be so rich that 'we shall then once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful.’ So far so good. However … Keynes warns: “But beware!, the time for all that is not yet. For at least another 100 years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone else that fair is foul and foul is fair : for foul is useful and fair is not”.
In other words, even a brilliant mind like Keynes failed to spring the trap. In an economic system in which an endless inflation of wants took the place of the satisfaction of needs, the time for valuing ends could never come. Satisfaction implies limits and the capital system based on the endless self-expansion of values can recognise no such end point. Keynes allows the nihilism of the capital economy to blind his conscience and silence his reason. His reasoning has all the diabolism of Faust. “If moral considerations stand in the way of progress, we must turn a blind eye to them in order that men in the future may have the morality lacking in us.” On those grounds, human beings in the future will never have morality. By setting up an opposition between material progress and moral considerations, there will never come a time for morality in an economy of endless expansion. Most interesting for me is Keynes’ view that once we have achieved sufficient technological and economic expansion, “we shall then once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful.” “Once more”? The obvious question is that we could value ends and prefer the good when we were supposedly poor, why do we now have to wait until some unspecified and unspecifiable level of economic growth.
The truth is that the habits we have been acquiring in recent times have been bad habits, with the virtues condemned as sins against the Gross National Product, and social, ethical and ecological limits coming to be transgressed in the process. Virtues are more than habits, they are habits chosen for reasons or, more accurately, they are about being disposed to act for good reasons. Of course, this is a long-term civilisational perspective, certainly and, in this all-hands-on-deck moment of climate crisis, we need effective short term action. But let’s presume we get through by the skin of our teeth – the key questions of ‘who’ we are, ‘where’ we are and how we should live our lives are still begged. We can do short and long term together.
I work with Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia, often translated as ‘happiness’ but better understood as ‘flourishing’, ‘fulfilment’ or ‘well-being’. It’s an ancient tradition, but the likes of William Casebeer and Owen Flanagan have been influential in demonstrating its continued relevance. For both, morality is a matter of skill and practical knowledge. The point is that living a good life, which I take to be a life in an ecological society (virtues as qualities for sustainable living), is a matter of integrating knowing how, knowing that and knowing why. There is such a thing as moral truth, and “knowing that” is important in mooring our thoughts, actions, decisions and beliefs in truth claims concerning right or wrong, good and bad. Such things are not relative nor conditional upon assertions of power or what ‘works’. Still, ethics is a matter of practical reason, and practical reasoning is involved in enabling us to determine the shape and character of the good life.
Philosopher and neuro-biologist Owen Flanagan and his work on human flourishing and “neuro-eudaimonics” is well worth checking out.
The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World by Owen Flanagan
https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/23744-the-really-hard-problem-meaning-in-a-material-world/
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/really-hard-problem
The primary objective of this book is to promote what Flanagan calls eudaimonistic scientia, or eudaimonics for short, namely the "empirical-normative inquiry into the nature, causes, and conditions of human flourishing", avoiding "temptations to revert to dualistic and/or supernaturalistic ways of speaking and thinking about human nature" and superstition and wishful thinking.
Stuart Kauffman in Rediscovering the Sacred is arguing something similar in taking a naturalistic approach. Flanagan doesn’t believe in Plato’s heaven of ideal forms, but he does think that eudaimonia is to be sought in the intersection of the true, the good and the beautiful. He isn’t impressed by what people in divinity schools says about truth. Fine. But what matters most of all is how we can make truth claims appetitive and affective, and this involves more than delusions. Science is talking the language of ethics and the good life. How far are we from Kant’s necessary presuppositions of the moral life? What’s the good life? Let’s translate it not as happiness but as flourishing or fulfilment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BahZpFDVbz4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faSYGVmQceM
http://people.duke.edu/~ojf/Ch23Neuro-Eudaimonics.pdf
Casebeer, W. D. (2003). Natural ethical facts: Evolution, connectionism, and moral cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Flanagan, O. J. (2002). The problem of the soul: Two visions of mind and how to reconcile them. New York: Basic Books.
Flanagan, O. J. (2007). The really hard problem: Meaning in a material world. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
And now I need to go and write my books.
Here are the outlines of materials. The task now is to distil the essence and stay lean and on the point, sharpen the focus, issues, problems, solutions, transitions, transformations, implementations. The rest is for another day.
Being and Place: Reason, Nature and Society
https://www.academia.edu/5786760/Being_and_Place_Reason_Nature_and_Society
Being at One: Making a Home in the Earth's Commonwealth of Virtue
https://www.academia.edu/12999996/Being_at_One_Making_a_Home_in_the_Earths_Commonwealth_of_Virtue
I shall end with Karl Marx’s definition of human emancipation in general, as something more profound than political emancipation in transcending individual freedom, preference and choice to locate commonality and universality – the common good expressed at present only in abstract state citizenship – within social relationships.
“The perfected political state is by its nature the species-life of man in opposition to his material life. All the presuppositions of this egoistic life continue to exist outside the sphere of the state in civil society, but as qualities of civil society. Where the political state has attained its full degree of development man leads a double life, a life in heaven and a life on earth, not only in his mind, in his consciousness, but in reality. He lives in the political community, where he regards himself as a communal being, and in civil society, where he is active as a private individual, regards other men as means, debases himself to a means and becomes a plaything of alien powers. The relationship of the political state to civil society is just as spiritual as the relationship of heaven to earth. The state stands in the same opposition to civil society and overcomes it in the same way as religion overcomes the restrictions of the profane world, i.e. it has to acknowledge it again, reinstate it and allow itself to be dominated by it. Man in his immediate reality, in civil society, is a profane being. Here, where he regards himself and is regarded by others as a real individual, he is an illusory phenomenon. In the state, on the other hand, where he is considered to be a species-being, he is the imaginary member of a fictitious sovereignty, he is divested of his real individual life and filled with an unreal universality.
Whoever dares to undertake the founding of a people's institutions must feel himself capable of changing, so to speak, human nature, of transforming each individual, who in himself is a complete and solitary whole, into a part of a greater whole from which he somehow receives his life and his being, of substituting a partial and moral existence for physical and independent existence. He must take man's own powers away from him and substitute for them alien ones which he can only use with the assistance of others.
All emancipation is reduction of the human world and of relationships to man himself.
Political emancipation is the reduction of man on the one hand to the member of civil society, the egoistic, independent individual, and on the other to the citizen, the moral person.
Only when real, individual man resumes the abstract citizen into himself and as an individual man has become a species-being in his empirical life, his individual work and his individual relationships, only when man has recognized and organized his forces propres as social forces so that social force is no longer separated from him in the form of political force, only then will human emancipation be completed. (Marx EW OJQ 1975).