agency at all. Even if members of the elite act as interpreters of technologically mediated logics of capital, this interpretation is in itself a form of action and it is something that agents can, I suppose, take up or refuse to take up.
The question we can ask is whether it has been and whether it is now possible to act on climate change in the role of a capitalist, because if the answer is yes to either question, then it at least makes sense to hold those members of the elite responsible who could have acted did not, or could act now but do not. If the answer is no to both, then we can ask whether we should still hold those individuals responsible because they could have and should have given up the role of the capitalist and done something else. After all, even after having stepped down from the formal position and perhaps having relinquished their assets, a member of the elite would still retain some of their social capital and knowledge about the world of business. They could, for example, use their social connections to influence climate policies and they could use their insider knowledge to make climate activist strategies more efficient.
One way to look into the responsibility of senior decision makers is to ask counterfactual questions. If other people had been at key positions in the fossil fuel industry during the last thirty years, would things now be different? For if they were, this would mean that the environment of the senior decision makers does not determine their actions. This is a difficult question, and both empirical and theoretical research would be needed to answer it. We would have to know how much the structural positions both enabled and constrained the possibilities for action and change for the actual individuals who occupied them. We would obtain different results regarding different individuals, and it might be difficult to generalize from them. In any case, it is not theoretically impossible to do—in the case of the elite—what Jamieson and others think impossible: to hold some members of the elite directly responsible for some climate harms, and hold some partly responsible for the overall problem. In some cases this may even be easy. I offer a fictional case for consideration.
We can imagine someone, Jane, deliberately striving to become a senior manager in a fossil energy company in order to change it into a socially responsible and green company producing solely renewable energy, only to realize during her ascent in the company that the realities of the market, organizational culture, infrastructural path dependencies, and investor demands make this a lot more difficult than she thought. One morning, after some time, she looks back at her previous naive ideals with amusement and gratitude that she now knows how “the real world” works and no longer thinks climate change is such a problem and, even
if it is, it is a problem no individual can change, but the infinite human capacity for innovation fueled by market incentives will in the end prevail. The company’s PR department still funnels money to climate change denialist think tanks and fossil fuel lobbyists who try to convince politicians not to vote for restrictions on emissions. We might find Jane blameworthy in many ways, but where exactly did things go wrong and why?
Jane could not be held responsible for the structural conditions as she found them. However, we can ask what she could have done to change them and what she could have done differently when constrained by them. Did she do everything she could, or did she lack imagination and fail to see some options that were available to her? Maybe she could have tried to forge alliances with other ethically minded managers and investors. If there were nothing she could do to change the structures, maybe at least refusing to participate would have been better. She might have found some other occupation, which, if not beneficial, might have been less harmful. By quitting her job, she might have kept her moral character intact. With the knowledge she had gathered during her time at the company, she could have helped environmental groups and climate activists to be more effective.
The classic moral philosophical term akrasia, weakness of will, is one possible explanatory concept for Jane’s actions and non-actions. She knows what is right but still ends up doing the wrong thing, as we often do, because we feel that doing the right thing would be too difficult for us for some reason. Amelie Rorty notes that akrasia is often a social phenomenon, for “[a]s standard ordinary beliefs are elicited and reinforced by our fellows, so too are many of our favorite akratic failures” (1997, 652). But Jane also gradually changes the way she thinks about how the world works and about right and wrong. Akratic behavior and its rationalization and the distorted epistemic community she inhabits distort her beliefs. Jane does not learn from her failure, but instead changes her perspective so that the failure comes to seem like a success.
Jane’s akrasia is both moral and epistemic. This is not surprising since environmental responsibility is a hybrid virtue with both epistemic and moral components;43 she starts caring less about things and beings she ought to care about, which in turn influences the way she sees and understands the world. She cares more and more about what her colleagues think about her and less and less about the effects that her company has on the vulnerable. This failure to care means she does not take the time to actually learn about those effects and thus does not know in what ways she could make a difference. Daniel Greco (2014)
43 See chapter 2 above.
suggests that epistemic akrasia has to do with fragmentation or inner conflict.44 In Jane’s case the inner epistemic conflict or fragmentation has social reasons. Her changed social environment provides reasons and cues to have a certain set of beliefs about the world and her place in it that come into conflict with the earlier set of beliefs, which grounded her aspirations to change the world.
Her structural position, her everyday life, her colleagues who have also become her close friends, the company’s organizational culture, and financial incentives all play a role in Jane’s change. Perhaps, for example, she also feels that she has a responsibility to her family to maintain the same income and the same sphere of influence in order to make sure that her children have the best possible start in life.
In some sense, we might feel sympathy for her. It is not easy to swim against the current when the cost might be one’s job, the respect of one’s peers, and even one’s closest friends. I do not know if these would be extenuating circumstances if the court cases against CEOs envisioned by Hansen ever became a reality. Even trying to weigh these goods against the harms of climate change, however, feels wrong.
Jane is also incredibly privileged, possesses influence and social power, and has access to resources and knowledge. Even if she quit or lost her job, her life would probably not become intolerable. Compared to most others, she will be fairly safe from the catastrophic climate impacts of the near future. This might make us feel less sympathetic for her failure to even try to make a difference. What makes intuition and sympathy somewhat problematic guides in this case is that we appraise a gradual change in time without experiencing the passage of that time ourselves. Reading a full-length novel of Jane’s life might make us feel differently about her.
Jane is an ambiguous figure. More work would be needed to understand the exact level and nature of her responsibility. However, since Jane is my invention, I can insert into the story some bad acts by her, conceivable as possible in the real world, acts that would clearly make her causally responsible for climate harms.
Suppose the president of a powerful state meets with the representatives of different interest groups, including Jane, now a CEO, before important international climate negotiations. The president is leaning toward arguing for tough controls on carbon emissions but is also somewhat worried about
44 The word “conflict” is perhaps unfortunate. Akrasia might feel less like conflict and more like pleasant and soothing acceptance of ignorance or conforming to the expectations of the social environment. One might suspect in some parts of one’s being that these beliefs are false, but akrasia amounts to letting go of this suspicion rather than pursuing and examining it.
employment figures and corporate donations for his campaign for a second term.
Jane, armed with figures produced by climate denialist think tanks, convinces the president that the effects on employment would be much worse than he thought and that climate change risks have been exaggerated; without quite saying so aloud, she also makes clear that she influence with lots of big-money donors. As a result of Jane’s exchanges with the president, the climate negotiations fail to produce any results. The causes of the results of international negotiations are many and complex, but all other things being equal, the result would have been different had Jane and the president not met.45 Without a binding agreement, emissions continue to grow and some critical thresholds are reached, with catastrophic impacts. Jane may believe in her own arguments, but she should know better. She used to know better, and her reasons for knowing worse now stem from factors of social belonging and perhaps excessive self-love and ambition or cowardice rather than epistemically responsible practices. Her ignorance, if it is genuine ignorance, is culpable (Smith 1983). The first version of Jane’s story is about everyday life and habitual actions in a social role. A narrative of this sort gives us a picture of how structures slowly shape the epistemic and moral capacities of a person. The second narrative shows how the world is structured in such a way that even an extraordinary single act can have far-reaching consequences.
Jane’s story should show that, with the structural viewpoint, the responsibility of the individual members of the global elite is not a clear-cut matter, but that blame and even direct responsibility are possible. The elite are “dependent rational animals” (MacIntyre 2001), but their circumstances make it seem as if they are not, even more so than is the case with other positions of social privilege (see chapter 2). Their knowledge about the world and about the good, about right and wrong, is a result of bodily interaction with their environment and other beings, along with their education and reasoning. However, during the last couple of decades, the global elite has perhaps become much more powerful, privileged, and insulated than ever before, and there is reason to think this growth of power has been undeserved (Sayer 2015). This also means that they can be causally responsible for much more than before. In addition, the elite has easy access to virtually all the knowledge there is in the world. If its members do not understand some piece of data or theory, they can always hire an expert to interpret it and explain it to them.
45 According to counterfactual theories of causation, Jane’s behavior is then a causal factor in how climate change unfolds. In a classic definition, David Lewis writes: “We think of a cause as something that makes a difference, and the difference it makes must be a difference from what would have happened without it. Had it been absent, its effects – some of them, at least, and usually all – would have been absent as well.” (1973, 161).
The structural position of the elite constrains its members as epistemic and moral agents and simultaneously gives them enormous power, but how does that happen, and what does it mean for the rest for us?