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ABSTRACT
This article discusses whether it is rational and valuable to have hope in the face of the climate crisis. The aim is to explore a distinctive Kantian perspective characterized by three main elements. First, hope is not seen primarily as a means of sustaining action, but action is viewed as a condition for rational hope. Second, the value of certain ‘fundamental’ hopes is not merely instrumental but derives from their constitutive role in our practical identity. Here, I focus on Kantian hope in the compatibility of our fundamental ends, happiness and morality. Third, the rationality of such a hope presupposes trust – in particular, trust that our conceptions of morality and the good life are sufficiently flexible to adapt to drastically new circumstances.
Acknowledgments
I already presented central ideas of this paper at a conference in on ‘Interpreting the Anthropocene’, organised by Darrel Moellendorf in 2019. Since then, I have had the opportunity to discuss my thoughts on the subject with many able people, of whom I am particularly grateful to Samuel Kramer, Darrel Moellendorf, Titus Stahl and Matthias Schmitt. Special thanks are due to Jakob Huber, who organised a workshop on hope in political philosophy in Berlin (2022) and who encouraged me to put this paper together in a publishable form. Two anonymous referees of this journal provided constructive comments that helped to improve the final version of the paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/25/our-house-is-on-fire-greta-thunberg16-urges-leaders-to-act-on-climate [last access August 2nd, 2023]. The network of climate activists called ‘Extinction Rebellion’ seems to share Thunberg’s scepticism about hope and chose ‘Hope Dies, Action Begins’ as the title of its first book publication (Extinction Rebellion, Citation2019). Similarly, activist Carola Rackete’s book is called ‘Acting Instead of Hoping’ [Handeln statt Hoffen] (Rackete & Weiss, Citation2019).
2. Kant’s works are cited using volume and page numbers (volume:page) of the standard Academy edition of Kant’s writings (Berlin. 1900–), except for the Critique of Pure Reason. The latter is cited using the A- and B-editions (A/B).
3. It is worth noting that Kant also recognizes an instrumental role for hope in sustaining agency, which I briefly outline in Section “Hope and the coherence of fundamental ends: happiness and morality.” Previous accounts of Kantian hope have focused on this aspect of his theory. Andrew Chignell, for example, holds that Kant ‘connects the ability to resist futility and demoralization with the preservation of hope for justice’ (Chignell, Citation2023, p. 54) and Jakob Huber argues that, according to Kant, hope ‘is a practical attitude that allows us to act under circumstances where the prospects of making a difference are dim’ (Huber, Citation2021, p. 2). My account is not the only way of presenting a Kantian approach, but it does offer a Kantian perspective on hope that has not been sufficiently acknowledged thus far.
4. This idea is connected to the conception of fundamental hope introduced by Blöser and Stahl (Citation2017).
5. Rachel Zuckert argues that Kantian hope is a feeling and that this is compatible with the view that hope can be rational (Zuckert, Citation2018). For a view of how Kant’s account of hope resembles and enriches the ‘standard account’ (Martin, Citation2013, p. 4) of hope, according to which hope consists of a desire for an object and the belief that this object is possible but not certain, see Huber (Citation2021, 7f.). In Section “Hope and the coherence of fundamental ends: happiness and morality,” I make a gesture towards an explanation of why Kant might not have been interested in an analysis of hope as a mental state. In my view, this is related to the fact that Kant was not primarily interested in the instrumental role of hope.
6. Philosophers who emphasize the positive effects of hope on action include Chignell (Citation2018), Huber (Citation2021), and McKinnon (Citation2005). Ojala (Citation2023) reviews the psychological literature on the question whether hope supports climate action. She shows that the results vary according to different conceptions of hope: Studies that adopt a ‘cognitive’ understanding, following Charles Snyder and including ‘agency’ and the ‘perception of pathways’, show a positive relationship with pro-climate action, while studies that understand hope as an emotion have had divergent results. Ojala argues that the divergent results in the latter case depend on the sources of hope – a point to which I return in this section.
7. Some philosophers see it as a conceptual fact that hope has motivating power. Catriona McKinnon, for example, writes that ‘hope generates a disposition to act […]. [W]e would think it odd to describe a person as hoping for an objective if she fails to act so as to realize the objective when presented with a real opportunity to do so’ (McKinnon, Citation2005, p. 237). However, this conceptual decision to link hope with a disposition to act is as controversial as the thesis that hope supports action.
8. Huber (Citation2021) discusses these dangers and points out that (episodic) despair might function as a corrective.
9. One way to defend the instrumental superiority of hope over other attitudes is to argue that all attitudes, if they are to lead to action, must be accompanied by a sense of one’s own ‘efficacy’: ‘[T]he levels of both fear and efficacy must be high in order to promote the intended effects (i.e. “danger control”). If fear is high but efficacy low, “fear control” may result’ (Marlon et al., Citation2019, p. 3). That is, in order to be motivating, fear of an undesirable outcome (as with hope for a desirable outcome) must be coupled with hope for one’s own efficacy, i.e. hope that one will be able to make a difference. In the following, I will bracket this ‘self-directed’ hope. See Huber (Citation2021) for an account of the role of this kind of hope in a Kantian framework.
10. From a moral point of view, it is necessary (according to Kant) to first make oneself worthy of happiness before one can legitimately hope to attain it. In what follows, I will bracket questions about worthiness to be happy and use Kant’s argument regarding a different dimension of normativity: it is not in a moral sense, but in a theoretical sense that it may be necessary to act as I ought to in order to be rationally allowed to hope.
11. To be sure, ‘false hope’ can be characterized in different ways. Chignell, for example, holds that hopes are false when the hopeful person ‘is misinformed about how unlikely the object of his hope really is’ (Chignell, Citation2013, p. 201). I do not deny that hopes can be false in a number of ways. Here, I focus on hopes that are false in a particular sense, and my conclusions do not necessarily apply to all kinds of false hopes (e.g. false hopes in Chignell’s sense need not be passive).
12. Thanks to Samuel Kramer for drawing my attention to this plausible consequence.
13. Serge Latouche diagnoses a ‘triple reduction’ (Latouche, Citation2020, p. 138) of the concept of happiness in capitalist societies: happiness is reduced to material well-being (things, but also paid services), material well-being is reduced to possessions (the quantity of goods and services produced) and the ‘hidden costs’ of this lifestyle (‘negative externalities’, in economic terms) are not taken into account.
14. This requirement has been criticized as insufficiently justified. Reath suggests that it is a relic of Christian influences (Reath, Citation1988).
15. Düring and Düwell aptly capture the special role played by hope in Kant in terms of the coherence of self-understanding. They argue that the ability to hope ‘forms a necessary a priori condition for the possibility of coherent (self-)understanding as such’ (Düring & Düwell, Citation2017, p. 55). Insofar as a coherent self-understanding is a necessary condition for agency, it therefore seems appropriate to classify hope (in the compatibility of the two fundamental ends) as a transcendental, rather than a psychological condition for agency.
16. Contra Kant, it seems that our commitment to both morality and happiness can be weakened (as opposed to morality alone).
17. Huber applies a similar analysis to the objects of hope: When we hope for a particular object, we forgo hoping for other, potentially valuable objects, which amounts to a cost of hope. He concludes that the choice of objects of hope must be guided by strategic norms; the benefits must outweigh the costs (Huber, Citation2023, p. 87).
18. This may explain why Kant does not provide a definition of hope as a mental state. He does not focus on its psychological role, and thus he does not need to refer to the mental characteristics of hope to explain its effects.
19. Roser defines ‘hope for an object X’ more precisely as ‘(i) the desire for X (ii) the belief that X is possible but not certain (iii) a certain mental emphasis on X and on the associated desire and belief’ (Roser, Citation2019, p. 204).
20. Admittedly, this conflict in our practical self-understanding is not transparent to everyone. But if Kant is right, the weakening of one’s determination to contribute to a better future for all (according to one’s means), is a consequence of such a conflict, namely the weakening of one’s commitment to morality.
21. See e.g. 27:320f.
22. In using the terminology of something’s being ‘practically necessary’ and ‘theoretically undecidable’, I follow Willaschek (Citation2010), who introduces this in relation to the postulates.
23. See e.g. Rosa and Henning (Citation2018).
24. See e.g. Thompson (Citation2010) and Shockley (Citation2022).
25. One might argue that trust in the cooperation of others is even less ‘theoretically undecidable’ than trust in the flexibility of our conception of happiness, since there is more evidence that is relevant to the question of whether others are willing to cooperate.
26. This lack of hope is structurally analogous to the hopelessness of those who live in poverty and who lack trust in the political structures that could ground their hope for a better life – a lack of trust that is often rational (Blöser, Citation2023).
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Claudia Blöser
Claudia Blöser is Professor of Philosophy with a focus on Ethics at the University of Augsburg (Germany). Her research focuses on practical philosophy broadly construed, including the history of ethics (especially Kant), moral psychology (especially forgiveness, hope, and the philosophy of the emotions in general), and practical rationality. Blöser is the author of Zurechnung bei Kant (de Gruyter, 2014), and co-editor, with Titus Stahl, of The Moral Psychology of Hope (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020) as well as the entry “Hope” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.