The Implications of Psychological Limitations for the Ethics of Climate Change (original) (raw)

The Perils of Explaining Climate Inaction in Terms of Psychological Barriers

Journal of Social Issues, 2019

As awareness of climate change and its consequences increases, many have asked, "Why aren't people taking action?" Some psychologists have provided an answer that we describe as a "psychological barriers explanation" (PBE). The PBE suggests that human nature is limited in ways that create psychological barriers to taking action on climate change. Taking a critical social psychology approach (e.g., Adams, 2014), we offer a critique of the PBE, arguing that locating the causes of inaction at the psychological level promotes a misrepresentation of human nature as static and disconnected from context. Barriers to environmental action certainly exist, and most if not all involve psychological processes. However, locating the barrier itself at the psychological level ignores the complex interplay between psychological tendencies, social relations, and social structures. We consider the ways in which psychological responses to climate change are contingent upon social-structural context, with particular attention to the ways unequal distributions of power have allowed elites to block climate action, in part by using their power to influence societal beliefs and norms. In conclusion, we suggest that psychologists interested in climate (in)action expand their scope beyond individual consumer behaviors to include psychological questions that challenge existing power relations and raise the possibility of transformative social change. Rising sea levels, increasingly extreme natural disasters, the loss of biodiversity, food shortages and an ever-growing amount of human displacement are but a

Climate Change: What Psychology Can Offer in Terms of Insights and Solutions

Current directions in psychological science, 2018

Can psychological science offer evidence-based solutions to climate change? Using insights and principles derived from the literature on social dilemmas and human cooperation, we discuss evidence in support of three solutions: crossing the borders of thought, time, and space. First, borders of thought could be crossed by using persuasion that is concrete and tailored to local circumstances and by highlighting information about people's efforts as evidence against the myth of self-interest. Second, borders of time could be crossed by using kinship cues, which can help make the future less distant, and relatively uninvolved advisors, who may help make the future salient. And third, borders of space could be crossed by showing group representatives how they might benefit from a frame of altruistic competition-focusing on the benefits of being seen as moral and global in orientation. Our overall conclusion is that psychological science can offer evidence-based solutions to climate c...

Does Climate Change Put Ethics on a Collision Course with Itself?

2021

The purpose of this paper is to outline an intuitive ethics of climate change, one that understands our maximizing values, according to which it makes things better to make things better for people, to be tempered by our existential values, according to which existence is just different: making things better for a person by way of bringing that person into existence doesn’t, on its own, make things better. Such a reconciliation, I argue, avoids the collision course we can otherwise anticipate between population ethics on the one hand and climate ethics on the other. The work of reconciliation is commenced by reference to what we can call the person-affecting, or person-based, intuition. It’s hard to get that intuition right; we need a formulation of the intuition that avoids the many pitfalls that many earlier formulations have fallen into. The principle I propose is, however, hardly immune to objection. In this paper, I consider and reply to two such objections both of which rely o...

The Effects of Morality on Acting against Climate Change

Suppose you are a moral error theorist, i.e., you believe that no moral judgment is true. What, then, ought you to do with regard to our common practice of making such judgments? Determining the usefulness of our ordinary moral practice is exacerbated by the great number and variety of moral judgments. In-depth case studies may thus be more helpful in clarifying error theory’s practical implications than reflections about morality in general. In this chapter I pursue this strategy with regard to a particularly important matter, namely climate change. First, I establish general conditions for when a moral judgement has any effect on those who accept it. Second, I show that the judgement that individuals in industrialized countries are morally obliged to act against climate change does not fulfil these conditions, and is thus neither beneficial nor harmful. Finally, I sketch several strategies for increasing people’s non-moral motivation to act against climate.

Moral Disengagement and the Motivational Gap in Climate Change

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2019

Although climate change jeopardizes the fundamental human rights of current as well as future people, current actions and ambitions to tackle it are inadequate. There are two prominent explanations for this motivational gap in the climate ethics literature. The first maintains that our conventional moral judgement system is not well equipped to identify a complex problem such as climate change as an important moral problem. The second explanation refers to people's reluctance to change their behaviour and the temptation to shirk responsibility. We argue that both factors are at play in the motivational gap and that they are complemented by crucial moral psychological insights regarding moral disengagement, which enables emitters to dissociate self-condemnation from harmful conduct. In this way, emitters are able to maintain their profligate, consumptive lifestyle, even though this conflicts with their moral standards with respect to climate change. We provide some illustrations of how strategies of moral disengagement are deployed in climate change and discuss the relationship between the explanations for the motivational gap and moral disengagement. On the basis of this explanatory framework, we submit that there are three pathways to tackle the motivational gap and moral disengagement in climate change: making climate change more salient to emitters and affirming their self-efficacy; reconsidering the self-interested motives that necessitate moral disengagement; and tackling moral disengagement directly.

Moral Enhancement and Climate Change: Might it Work

Climate change is one of the most urgent global problems that we are facing today. The causes are well understood and many solutions have been proposed. However, so far none of them have been successful. Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu have argued that this is because our moral psychology is ill-equipped to deal with global problems such as this one. They propose that in order to successfully mitigate climate change we should morally enhance ourselves. In this chapter we look into their proposal to see whether moral enhancement is indeed a viable solution to the climate crisis. We conclude that due to various theoretical and practical problems it is most likely not.

Ethical Challenges Posed by Climate Change: An Overview

This chapter provides an overview of key moral issues posed by climate change. It first considers overarching issues: the appropriate target for harm prevention; the distinction between duties of mitigation and duties of adaptation; instances in which efforts to fulfill these duties will be self-defeating or at work cross-purposes; and the distribution of the economic burdens of fulfilling those duties. The remainder of the chapter reviews challenges to the capacity of traditional moral theories to come to grips with questions of moral responsibility. Some challenges are generic; they are applicable to both individual and institutional agents under any moral theory, while others are specific to agent-types or particular theories. The chapter then surveys differences in the way wrongness is conceptualized, including theories that view wrongness as necessarily linked to harming someone, wronging someone without harming, and doing wrong without wronging anyone. The chapter concludes by showing how the challenge of developing a plausible theory of climate change ethics is magnified by the fact that the adverse consequences are a function of what numerous individuals and institutions do or fail to do, having both international and intergenerational impact.

Morals and climate decision-making: insights from social and behavioural sciences

Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 2021

Decisions about climate change are inherently moral. They require making moral judgements about important values and the desired state of the present and future world. Hence there are potential benefits in explaining climate action by integrating well-established and emerging knowledge on the role of morality in decision-making. Insights from the social and behavioural sciences can help ground climate change decisions in empirical understandings of how moral values and worldviews manifest in people and societies. Here, we provide an overview of progress in research on morals in the behavioural and social sciences, with an emphasis on empirical research. We highlight the role morals play in motivating and framing climate decisions; outline work describing morals as relational, situated, and dynamic; and review how uneven power dynamics between people and groups with multiple moralities shape climate decision-making. Effective and fair climate decisions require practical understandings of how morality manifests to shape decisions and action. To this end, we aim to better connect insights from social and behavioural scholarship on morality with realworld climate change decision-making.