The collective action problem view occludes the responsibility of individuals from the view of an outside observer, or “from a view from nowhere” (Nagel 1986), but it can also make individuals unable to understand their own responsibility. If an individual takes up or becomes gripped by the image of social reality presented in collective action problem models, they may have a harder time understanding how and why they are responsible for climate change. If I look at the world and see rational and self-interested, or just randomly and disparately acting, individuals who produce global effects unintentionally, I can scarcely say that I am responsible, except in the most abstract terms. Climate ethics that models climate change as a collective action problem will not help individuals make sense of their responsibilities.
The structural view affords the possibility of gaining self-knowledge of subjects embedded in social structures and ecologies. If I “look” at the world and “see”
structures, histories, and social facts and individuals as embedded in them, I can also try to examine my own place in the world with a critical eye. What could I have done differently? What can I do now? What kind of structures both make
25 As a relevant example, see O’Neill (1993; 2007) for criticism of neoclassical economics in general, including game theory and individualism in environmental thought.
possible and constrain my activities? How do my social connections and daily practices make me complicit in unjust structures? How does my position in the social world both capacitate and constrain my knowing, my epistemic capacities?
How does where I am now permit me to move somewhere else in terms of capacities for knowledge and action? The structural view offers individuals a theoretical framework for situating themselves, but this is far from simple. I cannot look at social structures as if I and my actions are not part of them: there is no pure view from nowhere.
Social structures shape not only the external constraints of how we navigate our lives but also how and through which conceptual frameworks we understand our lives. Some of this knowledge and understanding is non-propositional. It is “bodily knowledge” (Parviainen 2002) and “tacit knowledge” (Polanyi 1966). It is habitual, schematic, metaphorical, and depends on stereotypes (Haslanger 2011). Different theoretical perspectives conceptualize this aspect of knowledge differently, but the gist is that it does not easily translate into propositions, is not completely conscious, and is emotional, affective, and dispositional. This bodily knowledge is more about ”knowing how” than about ”knowing that” (Ryle 1949). Yet, it can concern social structures and moral action, since living in a society and trying to live well are not theoretical but practical pursuits, pursuits that require knowing how (cf. Bourdieu 1984). There may, I suppose, be gaps and discrepancies between one’s bodily knowledge of how to live in a society, one’s moral values, and one’s theoretical knowledge of how the society is structured.
Without theoretical knowledge of my position in the structures of society I could not understand my responsibility either in the narrow legalistic sense or in a fuller and deeper sense as a part of who I am, as both something that is given to me by my own actions and by my position in the world, and as something I can have as a virtue. I can be responsible for something and for someone, and I can be a responsible person. Being or becoming a responsible person requires understanding responsibility in the legalistic sense, but it is not exhausted by it.
Feeling responsible and acting responsibly at the right time and for the right reasons also requires bodily knowledge of a certain type in connection with theoretical knowledge: in other words, virtue. But I can also be wrong in both my theoretical understanding of social structures and the implicit theory of society that underlies my bodily knowledge. All this has consequences for one important development in climate ethics, the use of environmental virtue theory.
For Brian Treanor (2014, 37), virtue ethics can be divided into naturalistic and narrative approaches. Whereas the naturalistic approach to virtue ethics looks at
the flourishing of human beings from the ethological and ecological points of view, the narrative approach takes up “topics as varied as the role of narrative in cultivating both the emotions and reason, the necessity of a narrative context for framing ideas about flourishing and the virtues that constitute it, and the role of narrative in self-understanding and in the formation of identity; but they are unified in their respect for the power of narrative” (2014, 37–38).
For my purposes, the narrative approach is promising, because I am interested in the social and cultural contexts of moral agency, and the narrative approach is immediately social. We tell stories to one another, and the stories we tell to ourselves about ourselves are made up of other stories that circulate in our societies. However, the narrative approach should not be taken to mean that only linguistic narratives matter for our moral agency. Virtues are dispositions to act and feel in a certain way, and we may not have full linguistic access to these dispositions. Virtues are just as much bodily knowledge as they are about our self- understanding. Narratives may provide some access to what our bodies know, but there is no reason to suppose that this access is full and unmediated. Social structures, in turn, affect us on both the narrative and bodily levels. In addition, the division between the naturalistic and narrative approaches may be less clear than it initially appears. If Aristotle is right, we are social and political animals. Living together, making political decisions about how we live together, and telling stories where good and bad lives are examined and imagined are as much parts of what makes us flourishing organisms as having an impressive tail is for a peacock, or having an acute echolocation is for a bat. They are aspects of our natural goodness (cf.
Foot 2001).
The narrative approach also helps to understand living in social structures as temporal and historical. The risk with the structural view of society is that structures are seen as static as if they comprised a concrete building within which we navigate. While some structures may be very enduring and reified, they are nonetheless historical processes. A narrative approach to life gives one a better chance to appreciate how some structures endure and constrain action through time, and how some structures change during a life; in exceptional cases, we can even see how one ordinary person’s life has become extraordinary and contributed to social change.