reason is not without risks. The social worlds we live in are complicated and the framings of global issues can have unintended consequences. Atrocities can invite proper moral concern and the correct attitudes of urgency and personal prospective responsibility, but they may also cause irresponsible and catastrophic reactions. Atrocities should not be responded to by other atrocities. The atrocities of the Nazis did not justify the firebombing of Dresden. It is an empirical question what social consequences would follow if climate change were framed as an atrocity and if this framing gained traction. Here, as more generally, how to respond to atrocities is a difficult question, but inaction is not an option.
possible to disband an organization without harming its members. Sometimes members may be harmed in some justifiable way. They may lose wealth, privileges, or social standing, but this harm would be justifiable, since the goods that they lost had been unjustly acquired.
If climate change is evil and if some core purpose of certain organizations is to undertake activities that cause climate change directly or make its mitigation more difficult, it seems that we can call these organizations evil. If the core purpose of the organization is to burn fossil fuels or make fossil fuels available for burning, its activities contribute directly to climate change. If an organization uses most of its resources to make climate action difficult by lobbying and disinformation, we may be justified in thinking that this is the organization’s core purpose, even if its formal statements of purpose say something different.
The more difficult question is whether they are irredeemably evil. In the abstract, the organizations probably include decision structures that enable changing their business models and activities. Many companies and other organizations have undergone dramatic changes in the course of history. It is not always clear whether an organization is still the same organization, if, like the ship of Theseus, it has changed significantly over time. Yet, if an organization is evil and is seen as evil, it might be better to disband it, even from the perspective of its members. The history of an organization is always a part of it, and if an organization is known for being an active, significant, and willing participant in destroying the global environment, this would hardly be a legacy of which to be proud. On the other hand, if Shell, for example, miraculously decided to use all its resources for mitigating climate change in a just way, would we then consider Shell to be irredeemably tarnished?
If there are organizations whose core purpose is a significant causal factor in climate change, this clearly has implications for discussions of collective responsibility. However, the main topic of this thesis, individual responsibility, is also relevant in many ways. First, we can ask how these organizations are structured and whether there are individuals who can easily influence the way the organization operates. Second, we can ask whether being employed or otherwise affiliated with these organizations makes one responsible in a specific way. What about other connections to those organizations? What if my university invited someone from the Heartland Institute to speak to students; how should I respond?
What if a close friend took a job with an oil company? Of course, in some situations the alternative to working for an evil organization is starvation, but such emergency situations aside, if climate change is an atrocity, there is surely
something tarnishing in working for an organization that not only directly contributes to emissions, builds infrastructures that make for path dependencies for even more emissions, and employs and funds climate change denialists and deregulation lobbyists. I do not know whether in those cases I ought to admonish my university publicly and my friend privately or do something else. My social connections to them, however, mean that whatever I do, my actions could have a connection to climate change and I am responsible for them.
Being co-responsible for climate change by being a member or supporter of an organization does not require that one’s own activities directly contribute to climate change. Activities that support and facilitate the existence and operations of an evil organization are enough to make one responsible for the evils that are committed by the organization, while of course those who make decisions in the organization can be much more responsible. Sometimes just membership on paper is enough to make one responsible even in a consequential sense, as when, for example, the organization argues that the fact that it has so many supporters adds to the organization’s legitimacy.
If I buy goods from companies that contribute to climate change, am I a supporter? What counts as support? Most companies contribute to climate change insofar as all economic activities require energy, still mostly fueled by fossils. Some lobbyists for business as usual argue so when they claim that the fact that people keep buying fossil fuels or any goods produced with the help of fossil fuels means that they support their production and use. I suspect different moral theories may give slightly different answers to this question. The structural view can help by making the following distinctions between organizations and supporting activities.
First, all economic activities may contribute to climate change, but there are crucial differences between those 1) organizations whose activities contribute to climate change because the world is structured as it is, and 2) those organizations whose core purpose is to undertake activities that directly contribute to climate change, and 3) those organizations whose core purpose is to keep the world and our economic activities structured as they are. Second, activities can be differentiated by a) whether they support some organizations because the world is structured so that such activities are hard or impossible to avoid, and b) whether they are motivated by the desire to directly support some organization or another. Finally, we can investigate how social structures shape, constrain, and enable the motivations of individuals and the purposes of organizations. These considerations can in turn both help us assess the responsibilities in different cases and contexts,
and arrive, via negation, at a better understanding of what responsibility means and requires.
Should individuals refrain from working for evil organizations or try to change them from within? There are no stock answers, as organizations operate in different contexts and are structured in various ways. However, from the social structural perspective, we can see how for some organizations changing their core purpose can be very difficult. The activities of an organization can be connected to the interests of powerful groups. There can be infrastructural path dependencies.
Individuals connected to the organization can be fiercely loyal to it and understand loyalty as fighting tooth and nail to maintain business as usual. They can have deeply entrenched dispositions to understand the world in problematic ways.
Working for an organization every day forms people in certain ways. We should not think of these issues as excuses. We are all shaped by our environment, but we also take part in shaping it, though not according to our whims or under the conditions of our own choosing. If I want to think that I am responsible for my actions in my environment, I should think the same about people in other environments. Of course, different social environments make their occupants vulnerable to different blind spots. Usually we do not live in just one social environment, but have different roles and different projects throughout our lives, and social environments are not isolated monoliths, but rather interact with one another and change over time. The organizations that we belong to, with their institutions, norms, practices, and material infrastructures, are both constituents of our environment and vehicles for shaping the environment.
The example of Jane in the previous chapter showed how being an active member in an organization can change an individual’s capacity for moral and epistemic responsibility. Being a responsible person in relation to climate change requires a self-reflexive understanding of how the organizations one belongs to or supports are related to climate change and how one’s own capacities are shaped by one’s own relations to those organizations. Social structural models, in turn, view organizations not simply as sums of their individual members, but as shaped by wider, macro-level structures, while they at the same time shape, uphold, and sometimes transform the same structures by their activities.