to become virtuous individually might lead to a worse result than participating in a movement for social justice with others, even if one’s initial motivation for participation was simply the desire to belong to any group or having romantic feelings for another activist.
In a social movement, new relations between persons are forged, relations that are based on a common purpose or purposes and shared values, but those values and purposes become common in the process of the formation and the practices of the movement. In historical revolutions, militants have also turned into executioners and perpetrators of purges and state terror, but these counterexamples are still examples of individuals changing in the course of taking part in social upheavals; they just are not positive examples. The danger of turning into an executioner or a terrorist should not be brushed aside, but taken into account and reflected upon.86
The claim that taking part in a movement changes the participants is in itself fairly non-controversial, even banal. Since being human is an ongoing process of interaction with others and the environment, when these relationships change, the character of the participant changes in some ways. But are these changes fundamental? What would a fundamental change of character mean? How could we know if such a change has taken place? Are there changes that are more fundamental than others? And how are they connected to the political, social, and ethical goals of the movement?
One reason to think that there is something fundamental in human character at work in social movements is that they are about changing the world. They are about imagining what a different society would be like and planning for and acting to make that change happen. When discussing how to change the fundamental structures of society such as energy production, regimes of economic regulation, and cultural values, there would also have to be a discussion about what is fundamental for a good human life. Should we, for example, strive to make the economy more democratic or rather turn economic planning over to philosopher kings? If people are engaged in making large-scale economic decisions collectively, they will form different characters than if they leave economic decision making to others. Is democracy such a fundamental value that holding on to it, even if that it would mean less efficiency in mitigating climate change, is necessary? I do not wish to claim that such a tragic choice would be likely. It may well be that some
86 Future research on both the ethics and politics of climate change would do well to consider the nature of climate change as an emergency and the political and ethical implications of that consideration.
democratic system of decision making is more efficient in getting things right than any authoritarian system, even if authoritarianism seems faster initially. My point is that within climate activism such discussions can and ought to occur. In a collective movement, it is also possible to experiment with different forms of decision making on a smaller scale. If such experiments become a part of the daily life of the activists, this will over time have an effect on their character. Social movements are created and exist in spaces where it is possible to live differently than by hegemonic social norms.87 The problem for transformative movements is that they often stay on this level and become ineffective as a force of larger-scale social change. The argument is not only moral but also instrumentally normative.
In order to have an effect, social movements that aim at fundamental social change ought to have such practices that the characters of their participants will be changed.
As in Fraser’s definition, partisanship in social movements is crucial for critical theory. Karl Marx set an inspiring example. For Marx, observing and taking part in the workers movement was just as fundamental as critically reading Hegel and classical political economy. One of his important observations was that taking part in the movement changed the characters of the participants, an important aspect of which was that the movement was about changing the world:
When communist artisans associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is their first end. But at the same time, as a result of this association, they acquire a new need – the need for society – and what appears as a means becomes an end.
In this practical process, the most splendid results are to be observed whenever French socialist workers are seen
together. Such things as smoking, drinking, eating, etc., are no longer means of contact or means that bring them together.
Association, society and conversation, which again has association as its end are enough for them; the brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies. (Marx [1844] 1975b, 313)
87 For one autobiographical account of such a process, see Kollontai ( [1926] 1971).
This passage contains some of Marx’s fundamental moral ideas. For him, being human could have a similar dignity to the kind that Kant discussed. But whereas for Kant human dignity stemmed from the autonomy of the individual person, for Marx dignity is connected to the capacity for solidarity and the potentiality of taking society as a goal, in being an active part of a collective that deliberates how it wants to organize itself and its relation to nature (Saito 2017). This normative idea has philosophical precursors in Aristotle, Kant, and especially Hegel, but Marx’s being an observer and a participant in the workers movement must not be overlooked. My reading of Marx as having a moral philosophy is contentious, but it is certainly shared by many Marx scholars. It is clear that moral ideas can be read from Marx; the passage above is evidence enough. Whether these moral ideas have an important role in Marx’s theory as a whole is a different matter. I happen to think that they do, but here it suffices to say that Marx at some points of his life was inspired by and wrote about the moral ideas implicit in the practices of the workers movement and that this was an example of doing philosophy in the context of socially transformative collective practice. Similarly, climate ethicists can pay more attention to how moral ideas are implicit in the practice of climate activists and sometimes explicitly discovered and articulated by them. If climate change is a structural issue that is connected with other forms of structural injustice, exploring what happens when these connections are made explicit in practice is especially fruitful for climate ethics and for social philosophy in general.