Climate ethicists who begin by framing climate change as an unstructured collective action problem have so far discussed the duty of collective action as if climate activism were not already taking place. This is not historically accurate, but it may be a useful idealization from some climate ethicist’s perspective. Critical theory about climate change, however, cannot ignore ongoing struggle. It must take into account the ongoing efforts to mitigate climate change in order to understand the normative implications and critical force that they have. Nancy Fraser argues, following Marx, that critical theory is about “the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age” and if “[a] critical social theory frames its research program and conceptual framework with an eye to the aims and activities of those oppositional social movements with which it has a partisan, though not uncritical identification” (1985, 97). With Fraser’s definition, a critical theory of
79 It is unlikely that such an understanding could or would be imposed from above, given what was discussed in chapter 3. Rather, collective organizing and education at the grassroots level would be needed.
climate change would not just take climate activism into account, but would be partisan to it. The partisanship does not mean being uncritical, and it is not easy to know how much and what kind of critical distance is warranted. There cannot be a stock answer to this question, because different circumstances make different modes of criticism possible. This point would have to be added to Fraser’s definition. Critical theory is not only about changing the world but also about understanding it, especially how the world shapes understanding: how the conditions of thought and criticism are historical.
Philosophers can make conceptual clarifications and sometimes show where things that seem simple are complicated, but climate activists are doing practical work in an arena where the social world and its structures push back. They learn how the world works by grappling with it. They find that some strategies and tactics work and others do not. Looking at climate activism, both philosophers and social and political scientists can learn about how the world is and how it can be changed and what moral reasons are at play. Of course, activists may fail, and they may misunderstand the world in their practice, just as theorists can build models that are false. Activism is a social learning process with risks and pitfalls; when we try to make sense of it whether as observers or participants, we should remember that, at any at particular time, we are never seeing the whole picture or reading the whole story.
Axel Honneth (1995) has argued that there is a kind of implicit or pre- theoretical moral grammar in social struggles. For Honneth, social struggles are motivated by forms of disrespect, lack of recognition. The new social movements after the 1960s illuminated the importance of mutual recognition as both a social process and a normative principle. Marion Hourdequin (2016) has shown that theories of recognition are useful for understanding some aspects of climate change, but I think it should remain an open question, whether any one particular norm, whether recognition, justice, freedom, equality, or ecological flourishing explain and motivate social struggles, and even if they did, whether this or that particular principle ought to guide our future. This is so for three reasons. First, we are living at a point of history where there will be massive global changes due to climate change in any case, and we have to very quickly learn to live with this situation and find ways to intervene in these processes of change so that the world will not be dramatically worse, unjust, unfree, where people are “debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being[s]” (Marx [1843] 1975, 182). Second, climate change concerns future generations and non-humans as well, and it is still a very much an open question how we should ethically relate to people who do not yet exist, to
animals, to other species, and to ecosystems. A model of mutual recognition probably gets many things right, but it is obviously problematic when the other part of the ethical relation is incapable of recognition. And third, our moral norms are in various ways implicated in the same social processes of global capitalism that have led to the current situation; just as we should criticize our social systems for leading to climate change, we should also critically examine our social theories, both descriptive and normative, from the perspective of climate change (cf.
Gardiner 2011). While rejecting Honneth’s monism for epistemic reasons, at least provisionally, I find the concept of moral grammar useful and inspirational, at least as a heuristic. The concept of moral grammar allows us to make comparisons of normative ideals, whether outspoken or implicit in political practices, on a level that does not require the use of same moral concepts, just as we can compare the grammars of languages with different vocabularies. However, just like linguists studying non-Indo-European languages, we should not assume in advance that the grammars we know are universal, even if we can assume that all languages have some kind of grammar.
The structural account discussed so far has already proven to be helpful in understanding the social connections that give rise to both climate change and other forms of injustice. On the one hand, experiencing and understanding other forms of injustice may help in understanding climate change. On the other hand, the emerging climate activist movement also appears to show that it is possible to be concerned about climate change and act, even if one is not (yet) suffering from climate harms personally. The movement makes use of normative arguments that are familiar from the history of other social movements: global ethics, ethics of future generations, and environmental ethics. Some climate activists, unsurprisingly, are also professional philosophers, while others are climate scientists. They are all philosophers in the Gramscian sense: “[…] everyone is a philosopher, though in his own way and unconsciously, since even in the slightest manifestation of any intellectual activity whatever, in ‘language’, there is contained a specific conception of the world, one then moves on to the second level, which is that of awareness and criticism” (Gramsci 1971, 323). We can listen to climate activists and learn how they see themselves to be responsible in the forward- looking or some other sense. Both their words and practices can be analyzed by looking at both what kind of a conception of the world they contain implicitly and explicitly, and what kind of moral norms they assume.