we need to expand our circle of concern to take into account distant others, whether they are distanced by space, time, or species.
nature, when nature’s autonomy can no longer be the norm. Nature can no longer be regarded as autonomous, because human beings have already transformed the whole planet. Humans would then be responsible for this goodness, and, rather problematically, for “managing the global biosphere” (Thompson 2012, 214).35
Radical hope, as discussed by Thompson, is connected to responsibility in two ways. However we understand “managing the global biosphere,” it at least implies responsibility. Whether those who can make decisions that affect the global biosphere will try to limit human influence as much as possible or engage in large- scale geoengineering projects, these are now decisions that require responsibility in most or all of its forms. But radical hope is also relevant to the imperative of responsibility discussed by Hans Jonas (1984). Consider Jonas’s suggestion for a new categorical imperative: “Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life” (1984, 11). Jonas argues that responsibility requires “a heuristics of fear,” actively imagining the possible bad effects of new technologies in different social contexts (1984, 26). But it also requires that even in the face of the multiple disasters, tragedies, catastrophes, and atrocities that we should expect from climate change, we should remain hopeful that genuine human life is still worth pursuing. This is difficult not only because there are plenty of reasons for pessimism, but also because, for the same reason that concepts like courage are problematic, we do not completely know, and we probably have false ideas about, what genuine human life means.
By contrast, hopelessness entails non-responsibility or irresponsibility. Non- responsibility in the case of hopelessness is fully justified by the way the world is, while irresponsibility is implied if there were actually some possibility for change, but the hopeless person does nothing to bring it about. Nick Smith writes: “If, as Axel Honneth has shown, positive self-relations and a capacity for autonomy emerge through structures of mutual recognition, perhaps the ability to relate to the future as a horizon of possibility through hope is also a formal requirement of the good life” (2005, 52). Being a responsible person is thus connected to hopefulness not just on the conceptual level but also at the level of personhood.
Being responsible requires autonomy, and if Smith is right, then a hopeful disposition toward the future is needed for the capacity of autonomy.36
35 The wording is unfortunate. Thompson does not advocate any kind of specific geoengineering schemes, only that humans take responsibility for their own causal powers, whatever this will then entail. See also Vogel (2015 and, for a criticism of similar claims, Hettinger (2012).
36 While I cannot pursue this line of thought in greater depth here, doing so might contribute usefully to theories of recognition that have thus far not had much to say about intergenerational ethics.
In this case, as in many others, the virtue of hopefulness has both normative and critical aspects. On the one hand, if we are to be responsible, we must be hopeful, and on the other, hope as the “ability to relate to the future as a horizon of possibility” is something that the prospects of catastrophic climate change together with the social structures we live with call into question or make difficult to attain. In order to be able to be more hopeful, we would have to concentrate on changing our social conditions, but being able to take on the task of changing the world would require hopefulness. This is a real problem, and one many activists living in desperate times will likely recognize. It does not have to be a vicious circle, however. In chapter 5, I argue that taking part in social action that aims at transformation can be a life-altering event that changes one’s dispositions, including the capacity to hope. Of course, wearing oneself out in activism may also lead to hopelessness and lethargy.
It would also appear that radical hope requires the capacity for responsibility to be effective. More precisely, radical hope and responsibility can exist in an interdependent, mutually reinforcing relationship. Hoping without taking responsibility for bringing about the desired change in the world could manifest, for example, itself in a belief that someone else—politicians or the global elite—
will take care of everything. As I argue in the next chapter, such hope would be misplaced and a failure to take responsibility. Radical hope as a climate ethical virtue would consist of political and social activity and the belief that this activity is meaningful; it would involve an active search for and articulation of that meaning.
Understanding responsibility through radical hope does not paint a complete picture of what responsibility now and in the future will entail. Rather, radical hope, along with the other epistemic and moral virtues knotted together with responsibility are the virtues that are involved in searching for new forms of the good life. They are needed in social transformative action, and they make such action more likely to produce forms of consciousness adequate to the new reality.
Very little about them is certain, considering how uncertain our future looks at the moment.
There may also be a problems in reconciling the environmental virtues that promote care, a slow life, and adapting to the rhythms of ecosystems with the virtues needed for taking part in social transformation. This becomes even more difficult if we think that there is a possibility things will go so wrong that large-scale geoengineering is needed to keep the planet habitable for human beings. I will not rehearse the heated debates on geoengineering here, but will note instead that it is difficult to imagine a person or even organization so plastic that they could be well
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