The idea that climate change is an unstructured collective action problem is very prevalent in analytical climate ethics. Christopher Kutz offers a common account of unstructured collective action problems: “[e]nvironmental damage is typically the result of the knowing but uncoordinated activity of disparate individuals each of whose actions contributes only imperceptibly to the resulting harm” (2000, 171).
Global warming is supposed to have come about through the actions of billions of individuals, but those individuals do not form a structured collective with decision procedures and a chain of command that could be blamed as a collective. And where we could hold individual members of a structured collective like the Nazi Party morally accountable owing to their avowed membership, we cannot say the same with climate change, since there are no membership cards for the carbon emissions club.10 On the other hand, no individual as such could be easily blamed, for their individual emissions contribute to any harms caused by climate change through a very complex causal chain and only in concert with many other emitters.
People are not unaware that carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions cause global warming, but they do not see immediately how their own activities affect the climate. Since any individual is only one among millions, whatever they could have done differently in terms of their emissions, the overall problem would remain the same.
Many climate ethicists have therefore argued that climate change is a challenge to traditional moral theories and institutions. The environmental philosopher Dale Jamieson noted this as early as in 1989 in a conference presentation that was turned into a 1992 article. According to Jamieson, traditional moral theories have been designed to answer relatively simple moral problems where we can identify a harm, a victim, and a perpetrator. His example is Jack stealing Jill’s bicycle. It is contentious whether this model (victim-harm-perpetrator) and example (Jack steals Jill’s bicycle) captures most of Western moral theorizing from the last 2,500 years, even if it is a good example of the sort of things that twentieth-century liberalism has considered wrong (the violation of an individual’s property rights!).
10 In chapter 4, however, I argue that there may be organizations with membership criteria whose core purpose entails making climate change worse.
I agree with Jamieson that ethical theories need to be thoroughly reconsidered and criticized from the perspective of climate change. I disagree with his and several others' understanding of the structure of the climate change problem, a disagreement that has both moral theoretical and practical consequences.
Traditional moral theories may prove inadequate but for different reasons, and different aspects of those theories will be problematic. “A moral philosophy […]
characteristically presupposes a sociology,” writes MacIntyre (1985, 23), and different sociologies produce different moral philosophies.
After considering five cases of lost bicycles, Jamieson arrives at an example that he thinks best captures the moral dimensions of climate change:
[A]cting independently, Jack and a large number of unacquainted people set in motion a chain of events that causes a large number of future people who will live in another part of the world from ever having bikes. For some people the perception persists that this case poses a moral problem. This is because it may be thought that the core of what constitutes a moral problem remains. Some people have acted in a way that harms other people. However, most of what typically accompanies this core has disappeared. In this case it is difficult to identify the agents and the victims or the causal nexus that obtains between them; thus, it is difficult for the network of moral concepts (for example,
responsibility, blame, and so forth) to gain traction. (Jamieson 2010, 436)
According to Jamieson, this example displays the essential features of the collective action problem. Climate change is supposed to be analogous to this example in the sense that it shares the same significant features that make assigning responsibility difficult or impossible. Individuals act independently of one another, without co-ordination, without knowing one another. Somehow, not intentionally or even explicably, their actions aggregately produce a harmful effect. In themselves, these actions are innocent, but their consequences are catastrophic.
Driving a car, for example, is individually innocent but collectively harmful, because the emissions of a single car do not cause any disturbance in the climate system, but the aggregate effects of billions of drivers are a different story (cf.
Sinnott-Armstrong 2005; Broome 2012). If the actions of individuals do not in
themselves cause climate change and if no one intends the collective outcome, then no one is responsible.
John Broome by contrast calculates that even the emissions of individuals may cause some harm, arguing that individuals in their private lives have a duty of justice to lower their emissions or somehow compensate for them. However, individuals can make a much greater difference in the world by using their resources to help others directly or through charities than by lowering their own emissions (Broome 2012, 13, 65).
For both Jamieson and Broome, the morally significant actions concerning climate change are the emissions of individuals. I argue throughout this thesis that, instead of individuals’ emissions, we ought to pay attention to how their practices uphold or resist social structures. Yet, it is worth asking why would so many act in ways that emit carbon and other greenhouse gases. In Jamieson’s bicycle example, it seems that this is just a coincidence. Unacquainted individuals just happen to act independently in all kinds of ways, but the unintended collective result is horrible.
To be fair, Jamieson gives several reasons from economic factors to evolutionary psychology when he analyses reasons for inaction on climate change, but these factors are in play for him only once the problem already exists (Jamieson 2014).
However, in terms of how the problem came about, he still thinks that the example of future people never having bicycles is a good example, and that this example show well the challenges of assigning responsibility and blame for climate change.
Jamieson’s basic model for understanding climate change cannot account for the reasons for emitting greenhouse gases and other drivers of global warming, such as deforestation, and he does not discuss how these reasons may be connected and so be parts of a social totality. However, if, as I argue, human beings are socially and culturally embedded creatures whose activities are both made possible and constrained by social structures, and if social structures are such that different individuals do not all share the same possibilities and constraints, then attending to those structures is necessary for understanding individual responsibility for climate change.