argued that accountability for past deeds is an important aspect of our moral lives, and losing it in the face of socially structured practices and misuses of social power carries moral risks.24
The social connection model is a useful framework for understanding responsibility in a situation where we know that we are connected with other people around the world in many ways. Over the course of this thesis, however, I come to advocate a more pluralistic conception of responsibility by showing how different conceptions of responsibility make sense in different ways if we take climate change to be a social structural issue. Any one approach to responsibility, and the social connection model in particular, can be a good start for understanding the responsibility of individuals embedded in complex and global social structures, but in thinking carefully and thoroughly about one’s situation, other concepts and frameworks will come into play. My pluralism is epistemic and provisional. It is epistemic because I do not dismiss the possibility that there could be a true account of responsibility that would be monist, but I do not think any current account fits the bill. It is provisional because different historical circumstances make different theories possible, and we do not yet have access to those frameworks that could obtain in a radically different future.
of what will happen in the future. Many power interests are entangled in the issue, which has consequences for knowledge formation. Let us even suppose that the more bicycles one owns, the more one can influence public opinion. The most popular way of communication is via letters carried by bicycle messengers.
In a scenario such as this, it is possible to assign different degrees of causal and moral responsibility to persons and groups. Clearly it makes a difference how influential one is and how much resources one has. We cannot a priori say that no one is responsible or even that no one is culpable. There are those who have had both social power and access to knowledge; their social power is not external to the problem itself, but is rather made possible by the things that contribute to the problem. Whether some of them are much more culpable than others is a matter of empirical investigation, but this investigation requires a theoretical background and conceptual tools that are able to recognize how social structures empower and constrain individuals.
The structural perspective means that we can make more nuanced evaluations of our actions and practices. Many other actions and practices than “individual emissions” are relevant to the question of responsibility for climate change. We should see them as connected to and interdependent with other practices and reinforced and constrained by them. We cannot map all these connections and interdependencies, so we have to resort to models and theories, which in turn will imply different moral questions. The social connection model makes it possible to discuss individual responsibility in a more complex manner in ways that do not leave those with less power as the audience at a spectacle where the powerful cause disasters and then take or fail to take responsibility. Power relations themselves can change, and mitigating climate change will by necessity change them, since it will mean that those whose power is dependent on the fossil economy will lose that power.
The structural perspective therefore does not mean that ethics or even the first- person perspective and individual responsibility are irrelevant. However, it means that moral agency does not exist in a vacuum. We are embodied and embedded beings. The possibilities, ways of understanding, and resources needed for taking responsibility for climate change are in many ways external to the subject. This means that the subject has to be understood relationally. We only become subjects in relation not only to other people, but also with machines, economic and social systems, structures, and institutions, books, laws of nature, mountains, forests, rivers, cities, football fields, corn fields, and shopping malls, and with creatures whom we do not yet count us people, but should. One aspect of responsibility
would be displaying epistemic humility in a situation where we are faced with a complex problem and are not only ignorant about the precise effects of our practices, but also unsure about who should count as an object of responsibility and where our intuitions about both are conditioned by self-destructive and unjust social structures.
From growing and living with these relations, we develop an individuated perspective on the world, from which we take or fail to take responsibility. Moral philosophy may deal with collective responsibility, public policy, and global justice, and these should all be discussed in relation to climate change, but the question still arises: “what should I do and why?” Young’s social connection model is a good starting point for rethinking individual responsibility, but there is more work to be done. How can we become responsible within social structures that foster irresponsibility and whose practices, technologies, and infrastructures have irresponsibility built into them? The dangerous flipside of thinking about individual responsibility is that there is a well-documented ideological tendency in our times to reduce structural injustices to individual failures; the tendency to understand climate change in terms of individual emissions may even be an instance of this ideology. I discuss these issues in the next chapter.