disposed to slow, ecological living, revolutionary action or either taking or submitting to decisions to geoengineer earth systems in conditions of radical uncertainty. Our capitalist social systems do not exactly promote any of those virtues, but perhaps they promote plasticity and living with contradictions and conflicting expectations, when people have to juggle different roles as workers, family members, friends, and social activists. Such plasticity, in turn, may promote complacency and moral corruption that allow one to always excuse some wrongdoing by the demands of some role or other; the CEO who excuses environmentally catastrophic decisions by the obligations to the shareholders is a prime example. Is this a problem for virtue theory? I am more inclined to think of it as a problem for our social conditions. The practical antinomies that we encounter while trying to live well are socially produced, and social transformations may do away with them—while perhaps introducing new antinomies.37
3.9 Conclusion: Difficulties, Risks of Co-optation, Radical
justice by looking at injustices in the world and we can come to understand climate responsibility by understanding how our social conditions tend to produce irresponsibility. In such a situation being responsible must take the form of social action that involves not just becoming more responsible ourselves but being aware of and trying to change the conditions that produce systemic irresponsibility.
Putting environmental ethics and critical theory into dialogue in this way is possible, because there are already negativistic tendencies in environmental ethics insofar as it has proceeded by diagnosing the social causes of environmental calamities and our warped relationship with the non-human world.
Some of the virtues required by the responsible subject sketched here are difficult to attain because they are impossible for the neoliberal subject. On the other hand, other virtues and virtue ethics as a moral practice risk co-optation into the rationality of the neoliberal subject. The individualizing tendencies of neoliberal rationality are especially risky for virtue ethical practices. The ideal neoliberal subject lacks precisely those virtues that would be required of a subject capable of being responsible for climate change—it may actually have the corresponding vices. The neoliberal subject is not simply a false idea but it is also enacted and operates in social practices, labor processes, and even technology design. The neoliberal subjects lacks environmental virtues, but in some formal respects, the neoliberal subject resembles the cultivator of virtues. Both aim to shape the self, the virtuous person according to virtue, the neoliberal subject according to utility.
Virtue ethical theories do two kinds of work in this dissertation. First, they are an object of immanent critique and texts whose contextualized critical reading points to social problems rather than just problems in the text itself. Second, virtue ethics provides a conceptual framework for analyzing the possibilities of moral agency in late capitalism and in the conditions of the Anthropocene. If I find problems in being virtuous in our society, this does not necessarily mean that virtue theory is wrong. It may also mean that living well is difficult or impossible in a bad world (cf. Adorno 1991). Other moral theories would also face problems. As Adorno argues, “[h]aving broken its pledge to be as one with reality or at the point of realization, philosophy is obliged ruthlessly to criticize itself” (1973, 2). There is neither a place outside the social or a philosophy that is free from the social from which to construct a conception of responsibility that would be adequate to climate change. We have to make do with the stories that we have and begin from where we are, but we do not have to stay there. There can be many conflicting stories and interpretations about what it means to be a responsible subject. All moral theories may help us understand our predicament and what we ought to do but they may
also all be complicit in and shaped by the same predicament. This is one of the main tenets of critical theory generally.
Being virtuous in a false world, to paraphrase Adorno, is problematic enough, but being virtuous in the face of climate change, or more generally in the Anthropocene, is still another problem. Climate change and other strange conditions of the Anthropocene make our world unstable in completely new ways.
Social structures and forms of life will have to change—hopefully not only for the worse—in order to both adapt to new conditions and mitigate what can still be mitigated. In the more frightening scenarios, the very fabrics of societies may be untangled. The trouble is that we learn and cultivate virtues in time, socially, and according to received models. To what extent will the virtues that we in our current societies can learn be adequate in the erratic times to come? In a sense, the virtue of responsibility should contain the capacity to grapple with this problem, to take it upon oneself to remain responsible. I return in chapter 5 to the questions of virtues and ethics in social transformations. In the next chapter, I discuss the formation of virtues and vices with examples of the global elite and their responsibility for climate change.