Steven Vogel (2015) points toward structural explanations while to an extent agreeing with both Jamieson and Gardiner that collective action problems explain why climate change arises and why it is difficult to deal with. For Vogel, our market societies are structured in ways that produce collective action problems. He uses the Hegelian-Marxist concept of alienation to illustrate how our collective actions in their current form come to be an alien power over us, because in global market capitalism, we do not have institutions for democratically deciding what to do collectively. We as individuals and our purposive actions are atomized, but there is no metaphysical necessity that they should remain so or indeed that they should have been atomized to begin with.
12 One important aspect of Gardiner’s (2011) criticism is that if climate change negotiations are modeled as game theoretical dilemmas, we tend to suppose that states as they currently exist are able to represent their citizens both existing and future ones. This important criticism can be made independently of assuming that climate change is a collective action problem, since even if climate change were a structural problem, attempts to solve it might end up looking like prisoner’s dilemmas. Gardiner shows that even in this case, it would be a mistake to model them as such.
Kopec (2017) also usefully points out that modelling climate negotiations as a tragedy of the commons might act as a self-fulfilling prophecy and thus have bad consequences.
It is common in environmental philosophy to argue that we are alienated from nature. For example, the shepherds in the tragedy of the commons do not see how their lives are dependent on the flourishing of the land. Vogel argues that alienation from nature is really an alienation from ourselves and our own activities, including all the effects that our activities have on non-human entities. This is alienation in the Marxist sense. We are alienated from our own labor in the sense that we do not determine how, to what purpose, and with what effects we labor; instead the capitalist systems of the market and division of labor, which themselves result from labor, determine what we do:
We are alienated from the world surrounding us–from our
“environment” – in that we fail to see that it is a world that is made by human action. And more particularly by social action: for the labor that builds the world around us is collective labor. The chair I am sitting on was built in a factory by the effort of many laborers working together; their labor required machinery, and that machinery had itself to be built, again by many workers; the energy to run the machinery had to be generated and the fuels necessary for that process had to be extracted, and these too required work. And all these activities furthermore needed to be planned, organized, financed, etc., and workers were needed for these tasks as well. We spend much of our time on chairs, in rooms, never noticing that the number of people whose labor made it possible for us to do so–in each room, on each chair–must run into the tens or even hundreds of thousands; we hardly ever give those people a moment’s thought. This seems to me a failure to pay attention to the origin of the things in our environment that is as striking, and as serious, as our failure to notice their origin in “nature.” We do not recognize our everyday dependence on nature, it is often said; I am suggesting that in the same way we do not recognize our everyday dependence on labor, and more precisely on the labor of others. (Vogel 2014, 93)
One aspect of this alienation is that we do not see our laboring activities as collective, as parts of a totality, just as the collective action problem view of climate change does not see emissions as parts of a totality—a chaotic totality without central planning but in which many activities are nonetheless “planned, organized, financed, etc.” One aspect of our alienation from one another is that we are
connected only through commodities like chairs, computer, and pizza whose origins in human labor are obscure to us. This in itself would be a rather trivial point; clearly all our immediate experience of any object, human-made or not, does not include its origins. But Vogel’s point is rather that what connects us to one another and our environment is human labor, and our societies are structured so that these fundamental social connections of laboring and thus transforming the environment and ourselves are not accessible to us as something we could change, but appear instead as if their current arrangement was a natural necessity.
Vogel is careful not to blame or point fingers. He appears to side with Jamieson in saying that no one may be responsible for our predicament in a backward- looking sense, even if we all have a responsibility to act in a forward-looking sense (2015, 217). Vogel argues that we ought to grasp that how the world as it is results from our own practices, and we should therefore take responsibility for it by transforming our practices “via the procedures of discursive democracy” so that taking responsibility for them becomes a possibility for us (2015, 231). To make Marx’s famous 11th thesis on Feuerbach slightly more complicated (but in a perfectly Marxist fashion), a Vogelian thesis might be that the point is to change the world so we can better understand it. The only way out, according to Vogel, would be to change our practices and social structures via discursive democracy. This will not change the fact that in a complex world with increasingly connected societies and powerful technologies, human practices will have unintended consequences.
I am sympathetic to Vogel’s account and his proposed solutions. However, it seems to me that his account of the structure of global capitalism is still too one- sided. It is as if, for him, there are individual market actors on an equal playing field where the structure of the playing field is such that it alienates the actors from one another and their collective actions. He has very little to say about power, conflicts of interests, and violence, clearly all parts of the way the world currently is. Vogel separates the market and the realm of politics from each other as ideal types and concedes that this is empirically inaccurate (2015, 226). However, a more critical approach would also consider how the practices of the market and politics intertwine and make each other possible, and how the market system is founded and maintained not just by politics but also by violence.13 It is possible to do this in addition to comparing ideal types, and similar conclusions may follow. If violence
13 See Marx (1976, 871–940) for a classic account; and Harvey (2004), Leech (2012), Jones (2016), and Tyner (2016) for different but possibly complementary contemporary perspectives on the relationship between market capitalism and violence.
is understood to be inherent in the capitalist market, it makes even more sense to advocate democratic politics to curb the power of the market.
It makes a moral difference, however, whether we only model individuals as market actors who are alienated from their own practices, or also as embedded in hierarchical social structures. Whether we can hold certain individuals and groups significantly more responsible and blameworthy than others for structural problems appears to require that we take power differences into account as internal to the structure of the world, as essential parts of the model that we need to use in order to ask questions about individual morality and climate change. If climate change is viewed as an unstructured collective action problem, the questions of power and interest are either concealed or added as an afterthought. For Vogel, environmental problems are collective action problems that arise because the structure of society is such that it produces collective action problems. He does not discuss power differentials in the structure of society and how these differentials affect and figure in environmental problems. Since the ownership and control of natural resources is intimately connected with social power, the concentration of natural resources in the hands of the few is a result of a history of war and forced appropriation, processes that are ongoing.14 Furthermore, because the hierarchically organized processes of production, distribution, and consumption all have environmental effects, the environmental problems that we face are not just a result of alienated market structures, but also structures of power, violence, and inequality.
If we take a structural view of climate change, this changes our understanding of which actions are morally significant. Sunday drives are not entirely without moral content, but nonetheless investment decisions, political decisions to regulate or deregulate the economy, designing advertisement campaigns for fossil fuel companies, telling all one’s friends to vote for a certain candidate, and many other actions that are not directly connected to emissions are morally and consequentially much more significant. It is a matter of social power and social positioning which ones of these or other actions are possible for any one individual.
Insofar as social structures create hierarchies and privileged positions, some people have more responsibility than others. They may also have incentives to act irresponsibly. There may be people who with their resources and social connections could have done (and could still do) a great deal to mitigate climate change, but have not done so. Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway (2010) and Naomi Klein (2014) document how some powerful people have not only failed to use
14 See, for example, David Harvey (2004) on “accumulation by dispossession.”
their influence to mitigate climate change but have instead intentionally obfuscated the issue and deterred others from acting. To explain and understand their behavior, we can look at economic incentives, group dynamics, and ideological schemas. A social scientific explanation does not preclude moral appraisal, but it is necessary for understanding responsibility in a complex world where actions and their consequences are mediated by social, technological, and political factors and by earth systems. In addition to the moral appraisal of powerful individuals, there are other relevant ethical questions. How should the rest of us associate with the elite? What moral risks are involved for those climate activists who try to further the mitigation of climate change by working with the global elite? I return to these questions in chapter 3.