participation but simple tolerance, looking away, makes us complicit.66 Being beneficiaries of an economic system that produces climate change also makes many of us complicit.
Climate change can be an ongoing atrocity, but for some people, especially us in affluent countries, this remains invisible because we are not suffering from its effects directly at the moment. This is one cause for complacency, and framing climate change as an atrocity might be required to wake up from this complacency.
However, climate change will also cause many locally immediate situations of emergency, such as extreme weather events and conflicts over resources.
Understanding how these emergencies are connected to the planetary emergency of climate change would hopefully help us react to them in the spirit of solidarity and with appropriate responsibility. The failure of European states in recent years to treat refugees from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan with anything approaching rudimentary morality suggests that our current dominant practices and forms of thought are inadequate to the emergencies to come.67
If climate change is an atrocity, we are required to take a certain kind of stance of responsibility toward it. What specific modes responsibility takes, whether it is better considered as retrospective or prospective, for example, depends on how we are situated in the social world and in relation to the atrocity. A senior decision maker in an organization that promotes climate denialist propaganda and has access to both economic and political elites is more blameworthy and has prospective responsibilities to make amends than most others. A police officer may have to decide how act if their role responsibilities and feelings of solidarity appear to conflict with their moral responsibilities regarding climate change if ordered to stop a climate activist demonstration. However, some forms of responsibility are peculiar to atrocities. An atrocity demands that we take a side. It demands that we orient ourselves in certain ways toward the phenomena that make up the atrocity.
It demands urgent action. It may trump other responsibilities. For example, Eichmann’s appeal to role responsibility was not an excuse. Taking urgent action rashly and without thinking may of course be dangerous and make matters worse.
Yet, inaction toward atrocities is morally unacceptable. The responsible stance to climate change also has epistemic components just as responsibility as a virtue does, for it requires finding out how one is situated in the social world in relation to the atrocity and what can be done from that position.
66 See Young (2006, especially pp. 102–13) and Card (2010, 62–87).
67 See Jones (2016, 140–61 and passim) for a discussion of current practices of policing and militarizing borders in general but also in connection to climate change.
Evan G. Williams gives the following conditions for a moral catastrophe, but he could have been defining “atrocity” instead, as the conditions clearly apply to climate change as discussed in this dissertation:
For my purposes, moral wrongdoing counts as catastrophic when three elements are present. First, it must be serious wrongdoing: for example, in the case of actions which are wrong by virtue of harming people—not necessarily the only type of seriously-wrong action, but certainly a type—the harm must be something closer to death or slavery than to mere insult or inconvenience. Second, the wrongdoing must be large-scale; a single wrongful execution, although certainly tragic, is not the same league as the slaughter of millions.
Third, responsibility for the wrongdoing must also be
widespread, touching many members of society. For example, the blame for slavery and the Holocaust does not rest merely on slave-owners and Nazi bigwigs; it also stains non-slave- owning Americans who consumed the products of slave labor, non-genocidal Germans who supported the Nazis for reasons of economics or patriotism, and indeed anyone who failed to oppose the evils as actively as he should have. We would never wish such a fate for ourselves or our loved ones—in fact, I hope I speak for most of my readers when I say that we would give almost anything to avert it. (Williams 2015, 972)
If we consider past atrocities like genocides, it appears that we can criticize in strong moral terms both failures to treat them as emergencies when they were going on and trying to forget them or speaking about them in euphemistic terms afterward. Atrocities ought to be opposed as actively as possible.
Following Theodor Adorno (1998, 191–204; 2000, 103–111 and passim), we can argue that Holocaust was an event that made everyone responsible on some level, although only some were culpable. This is because the Holocaust for Adorno, just like climate change for me, was not an accidental, freak event, but something made not only possible but actually probable by the normal functioning of modern capitalist societies, and that there is an absolute duty to do what we can to ensure that it never happens again. Max Scheler and Adorno were philosophical and
political opponents, but Scheler’s concept of co-responsibility68 shares similarities with Adorno’s understanding of responsibility for Auschwitz. As contributors to and beneficiaries of society, we are all in some manner responsible for the social structures that make some atrocities possible and probable. Of course, besides co- responsibility, there is differentiated responsibility, where the differentiating factor is the amount of social power one has to uphold or change social structures.69 Both forms of responsibility are significant for atrocities in general and climate change in particular. Individuals find themselves in different situations and contexts with different histories, and it is not easy to say exactly how any one individual is responsible. Co-responsibility for climate change means that individuals ought to accept that they are urgently responsible in some way or another and should try to understand how.
There are those who have more direct responsibilities stemming from causal roles or capacities due to social power, but everyone participates in a society in some form. This explains why Adorno (2000, 115) thinks that “triviality” is evil.
One aspect of “triviality” is complacency. If complacency is evil, this should make us feel worried. Are we complacent? What is enough not to be complacent? Is it even psychologically possible to fully comprehend the full scale of climate change and remain functioning in ordinary daily life; can we go on living without being complacent? This again seems like a question that cannot have a stock answer, because people live in different situations and have differentiated capacities for action and thought. Complacency from a member of the global elite is probably less excusable than from a single parent with debts working in a gas station. In any case, reflecting on socially shaped complacency as a cause for irresponsibility may be one path to a deeper understanding of responsibility as co-responsibility.
68 “In the life-community the bearer of all responsibility is the reality of the community, and the individual is coresponsible for the life-community; in the collective person every individual and the collective person are self-responsible ( = responsible for oneself), and at the same time every individual is also coresponsible for the collective person (and for every individual “in” it), just as the collective person is coresponsible for each of its members.” (Scheler 1973, 533–55, emphases in the original).
69 For Adorno (1998, 191–204), the possibilities of changing social structures seemed bleak, but at the same time he was conscious of both local possibilities of resistance and the possibility of different historical circumstances. What kinds of social action our current circumstances make possible remain to be seen.