How to Feel About Climate Change? An Analysis of the Normativity of Climate Emotions

ABSTRACT

Climate change evokes different emotions in people. Recently, climate emotions have become a matter of normative scrutiny in the public debate. This phenomenon, which we refer to as the normativization of climate emotions, manifests at two levels. At the individual level, people are faced with affective dilemmas, situations where they are genuinely uncertain about what is the right way to feel in the face of climate change. At the collective level, the public debate reflects disagreement about which emotions are appropriate to feel in the climate context. The aim of this paper is to examine the normative reasons in favour of different climate emotions by combining normative criteria from philosophy and psychology, such as rationality-based and consequentialist ones. We conclude that these criteria provide partial reasons for or against different climate emotions and that the suitability of each criterion will depend on various considerations, including the specific object that the emotion is directed to. We suggest that emotional disagreement in climate contexts may generate distrust, potentially hindering cooperation for climate action. We propose that we can ease challenges like this if we come to terms with the complex nature of climate emotions and their normative justification.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• emotions
• normativity
• philosophy
• psychology
• emotional disagreement

1. Introduction

Climate change has become one of the most emotionally loaded issues of all times. Given the urgent nature of the climate crisis, worry and concern over the issue has become evident. The latest UNDP report warns that climate change is a contributing factor to the current state of ‘anguish’ in which humanity finds itself, where 6 in 7 people worldwide are plagued by feelings of insecurity (UNDP 2022). Emotional distress is widespread in response to the climate crisis, ranging from milder and adaptive forms of emotions to more pathological states that can include serious mental health problems and functional impairment (Ojala et al. 2022). Yet, climate change does not evoke concern in everyone. Some feel indifferent or even doubt the existence of human-induced climate change and may even feel irritated over the frequent debates and emotional displays of others.

Interestingly, as we will show, climate change emotions have become a matter of normative scrutiny. Questions about how we or others ought to feel in the face of climate change (as opposed to how we and others actually feel) have recently gained attention. We refer to this phenomenon as the normativization of climate emotions. The normative practice of the appropriateness of climate emotions manifests at various levels. At the individual level, people find themselves confronted with genuine climate affective dilemmas. Can I feel happy and enjoy increasingly hot summer days, or should I instead feel and display worry, given the cause of this warming? Is it legitimate to feel hope and optimism in the face of a catastrophic scenario like climate change?

At the interpersonal level, this normativization has become particularly visible in the public domain. There, there is evidence of a disagreement and of an ongoing process of negotiation of the normative status of climate emotions. This negotiation manifests in the criticism or blame that some display towards others’ emotions for failing to conform to certain standards of appropriateness (e.g. feeling ‘too scared’ or feeling ‘too relaxed’ about the threat of climate change), as well as in the attempts to elicit, provoke, or induce specific climate related emotional responses in others through e.g., strong public messages of indignation. The normative questions that arise regarding the climate attitudes of others include: Are there reasons to think that some emotions are wrong, inappropriate, or counterproductive? And if some emotions are more appropriate than others in response to climate change, are we justified in correcting and blaming those who don’t display them? For example, should climate anxiety be considered an overreaction, a sign of alarmism or of a mental health problem, or rather a desirable, rational, and appropriate response to a crisis of high magnitude? As the climate crisis continues, current emotional responses may intensify, and new emotional reactions, emotional disagreements, and affective dilemmas may emerge, which would require new normative analysis.

The aim of this paper is to understand the normative considerations that justify the different emotional responses evoked by climate change and to evaluate their appropriateness and usefulness. While some of these responses might seem a priori inappropriate (e.g. the enjoyment of warmer summer days), they might still be appropriate from the point of view of rationality. The opposite might be true of other emotions, which might not be fully fitting in terms of rationality, but appropriate from the point of psychological human predisposition and wellbeing and useful when it comes to achieving climate action (e.g. hope in the face of climate threat). For our analysis, we combine normative approaches from philosophy and psychology. While philosophy possesses long-standing, sophisticated accounts to analyse the normativity of emotions, these are rarely applied to specific emotional settings, including that of climate emotions. And while the existing psychological research on climate emotions provides developed taxonomies and measures of climate emotions, this usually ignores the normative aspects of those emotions or takes certain normative assumptions for granted. Given the fundamental role of emotions in our everyday social practices and public life, insights regarding the normativity of climate emotions can help to improve our understanding of the complexities behind discourses on climate emotion, and promote social trust, collective action and civic practices aimed at addressing climate change. Additionally, we consider that these insights can help to promote a more mindful approach to how emotions are evoked in media and society.

In this paper, we approach climate change as an umbrella term for several different types of phenomena. It includes physical events that do not entail evaluative descriptions (e.g. the rising of the average temperature on Earth, the melting of glaciers). Some of these phenomena incorporate evaluations on what climate change implies to life on Earth (e.g. climate change as a threat to human life) or on what is currently being done to address climate change at the system level and individual levels (e.g. political decision-making or reducing flying). Yet other phenomena related to social practices and structural behaviour are mostly of an evaluative nature (e.g. the unjust distribution of burdens and benefits of climate change, free-riding practices, political inaction). The different nature of these kinds of objects calls for different affective responses (e.g. fear, anxiety, anger) to be measured against different standards of appropriateness.

The paper proceeds as follows. In section 2, we describe and analyse some paradigmatic examples of the negotiation of climate emotions present in the public domain. We show how the public engages in the normativization of climate emotions, identify some of the different standards different actors rely on when formulating their criticisms of others’ emotions, and suggest different hypotheses for why they may rely on those standards. In section 3, we present some well-known philosophical criteria for the evaluation of emotions, namely fittingness, warrant, and prudential considerations. We apply these criteria to some paradigmatic climate emotions and emotional dilemmas increasingly faced by individuals in the current climate scenario, with the aim of understanding the capacity of the different climate emotions to represent the objects and properties they target. In section 4, we present an analysis of the psychology of climate emotions. We discuss the implicit and explicit psychological criteria for the appropriateness of emotions, namely clinical, consequentialist, and contextual considerations, and how they are used to evaluate the rationale for different climate emotions. Section 5 is the conclusion, where we provide insights and draw recommendations for further research.

2. Negotiating Affective Normativity in the Climate Change Public Debate

The normative practice of elucidating the appropriateness of emotions is present in different spheres of our lives. We engage in this practice when we give and ask for reasons to respond emotionally and in an appropriate manner to different objects and their properties. With this aim, we create and participate in various sub-practices that facilitate the mutual correction of people’s emotional responses and the collaborative discovery of new evaluative properties of different emotional objects (Gallegos 2021).

This practice has become particularly salient in the context of climate emotions. There is apparent disagreement in the public domain regarding which emotions ought to be endorsed in the face of climate change, which manifests in the display of criticism, blame, or attempts to elicit different emotions. This disagreement does not usually build on explicit appeal to specific normative standards. However, it does rely on some basic norms against which people’s emotions are usually compared.

The public exchanges between the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, the former president of the USA, Donald J. Trump, and the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, are paradigmatic examples of the normative practice taking place in the public debate. The most well-known public speeches of Thunberg convey her frustration, anger, fear, and the rejection of hope. For example, during her participation at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2019, Thunberg said (World Economic Forum, January 25, 2019):

I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day, and then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.

Thunberg has been addressed by both Trump and Putin. In response to her emotional speeches, Trump wrote the following ironic tweet: ‘She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!’ (Trump, 2019). And after Thunberg was named Time’s Person of the Year in 2019, Trump wrote another tweet, referring to her pleas for governments to stop global warming: ‘So ridiculous. Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!’ (Trump, 2019).

Putin made a somewhat similar critical assessment about Thunberg’s campaign in 2019 at an energy forum in Moscow, by first voicing seemingly benevolent intentions (C.f., BBC News, October 3, 2019 and Bloomberg Quicktake, Twitter Post, Oct 3 2019, 12.05 AM):

You know, young people, teenagers, draw attention to today’s acute problems, including environmental problems, and it is right, it is very good. They definitely must be supported. But when someone uses children and teenagers for someone’s benefit, it is only reprehensible ... I am sure that Greta [Thunberg] is a kind girl and very sincere. But adults must do everything to not put teenagers and children in extreme situations, they must shield them from extreme emotions that could destroy a personality … Nobody explained to Greta that the modern world is complicated and complex, it changes fast. People in Africa and in many Asian countries want to be as wealthy as people in Sweden. How can it be done? By making them use solar energy, which is plentiful in Africa? Has anyone explained the cost of it?

Exchanges like this are particularly relevant given the different but eminent role that each of these three actors has in the climate change context. Thunberg is a highly influential climate activist with a proven capacity to mobilize a great part of the young population. Trump and Putin are the political leaders of two nations with high responsibility for past emissions and whose political involvement is crucial to achieve effective climate mitigation policy. Furthermore, important segments of the population take these agents, their political institutions, and their decision-making as worthy of social and political trust. This means that public statements like the above can attract great attention from supporters, who might take these remarks as expressing truths about what is the right way to respond emotionally to climate change.

There are interesting similarities between the rhetorical elements displayed in Trump's and Putin’s remarks. Both criticised Thunberg’s words, dismissed her messages, and implied that her fear is unwarranted. Putin disregarded Thunberg’s concerns and dismantled her authority by claiming that she (and by extension, her conclusions and emotions) has been manipulated by other, more capable persons, a common line of criticism towards Thunberg among some segments of the public (see, e.g. Pihkala et al. 2020).

One interpretation is that these comments respond to an intentional mechanism to shift away the focus of the public discussion from the object of Thunberg’s emotional attitude – political inaction on the face of the potentially devastating effects of climate change – to the emotional component of her remarks. This move can be interpreted as a ‘tone policing’ fallacy, an ad hominen type of fallacy where the tone of the speech is used as a reason to discredit the validity of the content of a message, and sometimes even the validity of the interlocutor. This fallacy typically occurs when, e.g. a woman is told to ‘be less emotional’ after expressing a concern that affects her emotional state, or a black activist is told to ‘calm down’ after expressing with an angry tone discomfort about an injustice.¹

The mechanism of shifting away from the content of a message can be combined with the consideration that holding and displaying a given emotion in a certain context is evidence of the mental state or mental health of the person who displays it, often erroneously but intentionally. Such mechanism is particularly salient when emotions are displayed by women. In our society, rationality has traditionally been considered as superior (and stereotypically male) and emotions and their expression as inferior (and stereotypically female) (Damasio 2005; Fischer 1993). This view may still influence the public perception on the appropriateness of emotions about climate change. Perhaps this could in part explain why it has been possible to describe climate anxiety as ‘hysteria’ (sometimes directly in relation to female gender), and the non-emotional approach as a rational response supported by ‘healthy skepticism’ (Pettersson et al. 2022; Toivonen 2022), despite the strong evidence for the severity of the climate crisis.

In the case of both Putin’s and Trump’s comments, their rhetoric could also be analysed in the context of a power struggle and hierarchy. Their remarks echoed societal perceptions regarding minors and women, as being vulnerable and innocent and therefore someone who should be protected and cherished by adults and men, respectively. Such views could be interpreted as manifesting benevolent sexism, a subtler form of sexism that allows seemingly positive or even admiring views on women but does not grant them equal influence in society (Glick and Fiske 2001). A paternalistic attitude could also be suggested, commonly present in the tendency to ignore the worries and demands of the young, while depicting them as ignorant children whose place is not in demonstrations but in school to ‘learn more’ (Bergmann and Ossewaarde 2020). Accordingly, depicting Thunberg’s reaction as misguided and emotional (and hence, a reaction that makes her a potential object of protection, instead of an authority) could be a rhetorical move. But it can also reflect how she actually is perceived by some, merely due to her age and gender: as a ‘young girl’. Consequently, her message and emotions could have been dismissed irrespective of their content and character.

It has become evident that we are not indifferent towards our and other’s emotional responses to climate change, and that we rely on different types of norms or evaluative criteria to judge the appropriateness of these emotions. To the best of our knowledge, these criteria have not been the subject of systematic research in philosophy or psychology. In what follows, we provide an overview of these criteria with the aim of improving the understanding of the complex nature of climate emotions, their normative justification, and their role in trust and collective action, much needed to solve the climate crisis.

3. Philosophical Normativity and Climate Emotions

Within philosophy, there is wide acceptance of the idea that emotions can be appropriate or inappropriate. Criteria of appropriateness vary depending on the view one holds about the nature and character of emotions. A paradigmatic view of the nature of emotions is that emotions are evaluative representations of formal objects of the world that contain value-laden features (D’Arms and Jacobson 2000; Greenspan 1988; Roberts 1988; Solomon 1976). Under this view, emotions are somewhat analogous to beliefs and thus can be assessed in terms of their cognitive rationality. This assessment is made by reference to their fittingness or aptitude to represent the properties instantiated by the objects towards which emotions are directed, their warrant and coherence, or their capacity to relate to other evidence-sensitive evaluative processes. According to the fittingness criterion of emotions, an emotion is rational in terms of being ‘fitting’, ‘correct’, or ‘appropriate’ if there is a representational match between the emotion and the object toward which the emotion is directed. For example, fear is fitting in those situations in which it is directed towards objects that are genuinely dangerous, since fear is a representation of danger.

An important caveat to this account is that the fittingness or appropriateness of an emotion is not meant to be a moral evaluation of it. Just as beliefs can be true or correct when their representational content matches the world and their objects, so can emotions be fitting or correct when they appropriately match the properties instantiated by the objects they are directed towards. Thus, the question of correctness is different from the questions of whether a feeling or an emotion is morally permissible, and whether an emotion is ‘what to feel’ all things considered. Under this account, offensive, immoral art or jokes are usually provided as examples of objects towards which it can be fitting to feel pleasure and amusement, respectively, despite their immoral character (Jacobson 1997). The wrongness or viciousness of a joke isn’t itself a reason for the joke not to be amusing. Thinking otherwise commits us to the so-called ‘moralistic fallacy’ that some have warned against (D’Arms and Jacobson 2000). The idea is that there are different grounds to evaluate jokes, and although offensiveness might be a property of some jokes, it isn’t a relevant reason for a joke to fail in the domain of amusement; doing so would be appealing to the ‘wrong kinds of reasons’ (McDowell 1987, 1998). Reasons of the right kind for one to hold a certain attitude, the argument would go, are those that bear on certain properties of the object – for instance, reasons to be amused by a joke are those that bear on whether the joke is particularly amusing.²

The fittingness criterion is behind some of our most common practices of criticising emotions (e.g. ‘Don’t be sad – it’s not such a big deal’) and it is often invoked when reflecting on how we should feel. Proponents of this account stress its usefulness over competing normative criteria: ‘(…) Prudential considerations, especially about fear or anxiety, are often counterproductive; and moral considerations can induce guilt without alleviating the offending emotion’ (D’Arms and Jacobson 2000, 73). The fact that it helps to avoid guilt and promotes action is a feature that makes fittingness a particularly interesting normative tool for the analysis of climate emotions.

Several parts of the world have experienced exceptionally warm summers since 2018 (Painter et al. 2021; Wilcke et al. 2020). This is one of the closest and most tangible effects of climate change that those living in mild regions of the globe can experience in their everyday lives.³ During these exceptionally warm days, people have started to feel genuinely torn between the enjoyment of sunny and warm temperatures, on one hand, and the feeling of guilt or uneasiness provoked by the realization of the causal connection between climate change and warmer days, on the other. This phenomenon has been echoed in several media outlets, with headlines that include explicit reference to the state of cluelessness in which we find ourselves regarding the appropriate affective attitude to have toward increasingly warmer days: ‘Can we enjoy, or should we be ashamed?’ (Göteborgs-Posten, August 3, 2019), ‘How long can we call the heat “nice weather”?’ (Svenska Dagbladet, June 24, 2020), ‘Am I the only one who’s terrified about the warm weather?’ (The Guardian, February 26, 2019), and ‘Can one enjoy the heat, or should one get anxious?’⁴ (MTV Uutiset, August 19, 2022).⁵ This is a paradigmatic example of what we call climate affective dilemmas, the type of affective dilemmas that arise as a conflict between different emotions elicited by climate change and other related phenomena.

By ‘affective dilemmas’ we refer more generally to situations in which individuals face a conflict between two or more incompatible emotional responses to an object or phenomenon, where there does not seem to be an obvious solution as to how one ought to feel overall in the face of it, and where the emotional status quo is not an option. In affective dilemmas, the overall most fitting attitude can be one of ambivalence, which does not have a counterpart in the case of traditional act dilemmas.⁶ Affective dilemmas are normative in the sense that they entail the existence and comparison of different types of normative reasons in favour of the different affective responses one is faced with.

In the face of increasingly warmer summer days, there are prima facie reasons to feel anxiety, but also joy. On one hand, there are reasons to feel anxiety about warmer summers because these are goods that are morally tinted by their causal source, namely humanly caused climate change with potentially devastating consequences for life on the planet.⁷ There are culture specific norms that regulate the display of emotions (Matsumoto and Juang 2013) and in some social and cultural contexts it seems to have become an implicit social norm not to express joy regarding exceptionally warmer summers; if joy is expressed, it is expected to be usually accompanied by a reference to how ‘weird’ or ‘scary’ this warmth feels. On the other hand, there are also reasons to feel joy during warmer summer days given that warmer weather is pleasurable – a preference that is shown to be extended among most people (Pew Research Center 2009).⁸

It could be suggested that failing to feel anxious or fearful in the face of increasingly warmer summer days is somehow contrary to virtue. It could be that the reasons for feeling anxiety or fear in the face of increasingly warmer summer days are stronger, or of a special nature, and thus defeat in this scenario the reasons to feel joy. Warmer weather is known to be caused by climate change. Failing to feel anxious or fearful would seem to show some sort of objective irresponsiveness to the cause of warmer summers, to climate change and to its dangerous consequences for life on this planet. So, if failing to feel anxious or fearful in the face of increasingly warmer summers is inappropriate because it is irrational (in terms of irresponsiveness to reasons), this would seem to solve the affective dilemma we presented above.

There is however a further question to answer, namely what is the object that our affective attitudes are directed towards in this context. Emotions are sometimes understood as affective reactions directed towards ‘simple’ objects (e.g. warmer temperatures) or bundles of objects with different metaphysical and causal properties (e.g. climate change). Individuating the different objects of emotions is important, particularly in the case of climate change. The literature on climate emotions rarely provides a systematic distinction between the different objects of those emotions, despite climate change being known to be a complex phenomenon composed by elements of different nature. This is an obstacle for our understanding of the role of climate emotions, as well as their evaluation and comparison.

‘Being caused by human-induced climate change’ is a property of increasingly warmer summers and it is reasonable to expect that many of us believe this to be the case. Thus, fear can be argued to be an appropriate response to this feature of warmer summers. However, these grounds seem irrelevant for judging warmer summer days in the domain of pleasurableness and thus cannot be a relevant reason for summer days failing at being pleasurable. In this domain, the relevant object is the warmth or the experiential part of warmer summers, toward which it would be just fitting to feel pleasure or joy. Doing otherwise would be an instance of the ‘wrong kind of reasoning’ explained above.⁹

There are other instances where clarifying the object of a climate emotion can help understanding the appropriateness of the emotion. Hope in the face of climate change, climate hope, is widely discussed among scholars, some of whom have emphasised its importance for dealing with this crisis (e.g., Geiger et al. 2021; Ojala 2012b). One may wonder about the appropriateness of climate hope in terms of the fittingness criterion introduced above. According to this criterion, emotions can be correct or incorrect depending on how well they represent the properties of the object toward which they are directed. If hope is understood in a ‘narrow’ sense, entailing confidence and certainty about a particular outcome (thus resembling more ‘optimism’, Ojala, 2012b; see Bruininks and Malle 2005 for distinction between these two feelings), i.e. as a response directed to a mental state of the kind ‘I have hope that we will fix climate change in x amount of time’, hope could be deemed as unfitting given the low odds of success in fixing climate change in such given amount of time, thus not matching the current state of affairs with respect to climate change. However, hope might be more fitting if it is understood as a general emotional state of the form ‘I am hopeful that climate change will be fixed despite of the high degree of uncertainty that we will succeed’. An interpretation of hope along these lines is behind recent proposals like that of ‘hopeful pessimism’, an account of pessimism that rejects ‘false hope’ and ‘pseudo-optimism’, without collapsing into full despair hopelessness, or fatalism, which lead to ‘giving up’ (Var der Lugt 2021).¹⁰ We expand on ‘hybrid-valenced’ accounts of climate hope in the next section.

Another well-known criterion for the evaluation of the cognitive rationality of emotions that is useful to understand our emotional reactions to warmer summers is warrant.¹¹ Rationality requires responding to apparent reasons, thus, an attitude is warranted when it is a response to apparent fit-related reasons. The relevant distinction here is between a rational assessment (‘warrant’) and an assessment of objective normativity (‘fit’) (Na'aman, 2021). If facing danger makes fear fitting (i.e. if danger is a fit-related reason for fear), then fear is warranted for an agent if the agent is facing apparent danger.

What does the notion of warrant suggest regarding how to feel in the face of increasingly warmer summers? Fear could be understood as warranted in this context if its object, the exceptional warmth, manifests certain evidential cues of dangerousness. It is plausible to think that many people hold both the belief that exceptionally higher temperatures are caused by climate change, and the belief that climate change is dangerous for life on Earth. But while current warmer summer temperatures are out of the ordinary, they have not yet become unbearable in the milder regions of the Earth, such as most parts of Europe, and remain within the pleasurable, or at least tolerable, range for most.¹² Additionally, people seem to generally prefer warmer climate. A survey reported that about 60% of Americans prefer to live in a hotter climate, while only 29% would rather live in a colder one (Pew Research Center 2009). So, although fear could be said to be a fitting response to this temperature trend, a generalized strong preference for warmer weather among people, together with the experience of warmer, yet-not-unbearably-hot temperatures, could prevent agents from acknowledging that they are in a situation of apparent danger, precluding this emotional response from being warranted and thus required by rationality.

Considerations of fittingness are important for tracking emotional rationality. However, in the practice of emotional evaluation, these considerations have traditionally been overshadowed by considerations of prudence or self-interest. Let’s get back to Trump’s and Putin’s responses to Thunberg introduced in Section 2 above. Unlike Putin’s, Trump’s remarks did not explicitly suggest disproportionality or a mismatch between what Thunberg expressed to feel and aimed at eliciting in others, and the object of those emotions. Thunberg was in fact cautious in making explicit reference to this proportionality: ‘I want you to feel the fear I feel every day, and then I want you to act (…) as if our house is on fire. Because it is’.¹³ However, Trump’s words implied that Thunberg’s anger was still inappropriate or unjustified in some way and prompted her to ‘chill’.

Demanding individuals to forgo their anger at an injustice for reasons of prudence or self-interest (e.g. due to anger being counterproductive in convincing people about the climate urgency) despite their anger being fitting or appropriate, is not an isolated practice. According to Amira Srinivasan, demanding individuals to forgo their anger at an injustice for reasons of prudence or self-interest is a practice that belongs to the long philosophical and political tradition of affective injustice. Affective injustice is a second-order injustice parasitic on a first-order, conventional type of injustice emerging from the oppression of a victim. The wrongness of affective injustice lies in forcing people, through no fault of their own, into a substantive and normatively costly conflict – namely, the choice between self-preservation and justified rage (Srinivasan 2018, 137). Given that, according to Srinivasan, apt anger has intrinsic value (e.g. it is a negative attitude towards something bad), and so those who, like Trump, demand angry individuals to forgo their fitting anger, face an argumentative burden: ‘they must explain why it is that in cases where one’s anger would be counterproductive yet apt, prudential considerations must outweigh aptness considerations’ (Srinivasan 2018, 136). In absence of an account that explains the presupposed value superiority of prudence over fitting anger, Srinivasan argues, we can be suspicious that the counterproductivity argument against the expression of fitting anger masks an attempt of social control over certain socially excluded groups, traditionally slaves and women (Srinivasan 2018, 136–144).

Cases of affective injustice are particularly interesting in this context. They involve a general conflict between consequentialist reasons (e.g. prudence, self-interest) and non-consequentialist reasons for action generated out of apt or fitting emotions (Plunkett 2020). In the case of climate change, anger may not be fitting were mitigation to be taken seriously and on time. However, even in this case, people could be said to have the right to freely express or voice past injustices that have yet not been recognized as such. Deontological reasons could thus be added to this dichotomy. For reasons of space, we deal with this conflict of reasons somewhere else.¹⁴

4. Psychological Normativity and Climate Emotions

Psychological approaches to climate emotions build on work that has focused on identifying emotions, providing taxonomies, and describing correlations with other variables. In social sciences, there is a decent understanding of some climate emotions (especially anxiety and hope) at the descriptive level and in relation to their contribution to certain outcomes, such as climate action or motivation. While there still are several research gaps, it has become obvious that climate change elicits numerous emotions among the public, and awareness and discussions on climate emotions are rising (Hyry, 2021; Ojala et al. 2022; Pihkala, Sangervo, and Jylhä 2022).¹⁵ For example, the latest Youth Barometer in Finland found that the majority (59%) of the young had discussed climate anxiety over the past month (Pihkala et al., 2022).

In psychological research, emotions are usually understood as some type of ‘discrete, automatic responses to universally shared, culture-specific and individual-specific events’ (Ekman and Cordaro 2011). Emotions are evoked in response to real or imagined stimuli of relevance for us and they inform us about how to think and behave in different situations (e.g. what should be approached or avoided) (Damasio 2005). Under this approach, the subjective experience of an emotion is usually called ‘feeling’. Certain emotions, such as fear and happiness, are commonly considered as basic and adaptive and have survival value (Ekman and Cordaro 2011). Thus, they are pre-programmed and involuntary, and are accompanied by corresponding physical reactions, although they can also be modified through socialization and intentional efforts. Some emotions are fuzzy and less distinct, often involving several psychological and physical processes simultaneously. Anxiety is a paradigmatic example, which is understood as a mixture of affect (e.g. fear), cognition (e.g. worried thoughts), and physical changes (e.g. fast heartbeat).

In psychology, claims about the normativity of emotions are usually implicit, but we identify two types of normative assumptions as more salient. In the first type, emotional states per se can in certain circumstances be considered inappropriate. They can deviate in statistical terms or in relation to an individual’s previous emotional patterns. They can also be unfitting or irrational, in the sense that they are not proportional in relation to their object in a similar way proposed by philosophers. For example, people can react to adverse events in seemingly irrational ways, such as with disproportional rumination or unfounded wishful and illusionary hope (but see Nolen-Hoeksema, Wisco, and Lyubomirsky 2008; Snyder et al. 2002 for thorough discussions). These criteria are particularly useful in clinical psychology (APA, 2013).¹⁶ The second type of normative assumptions focuses on analysing the consequences of emotions. Here, emotions can be deemed inappropriate if they induce personal suffering or behaviour that can cause harm to other people or society. In such cases, efforts are typically made to change or manage them through medication, therapy, or some form of reinforcement.

However, importantly, there are aspects of emotions and emotionality that may not always be meaningful to discuss in terms of normativity. If emotions are automatic reactions, it would mean that humans cannot fully and directly control them. Individuals also differ in their readiness to respond to stimuli. To exemplify, some are more regulated by moral views and the related feelings of shame and pride than others, and some tend to respond to crises by action while others ruminate. Contextual factors also matter; climate change, for example, is a complex chain of events caused by multiple practices across the world involving a certain degree of uncertainty and, hence, may induce different emotions to those produced by simpler and more manageable crises. Thus, certain normative judgements about emotions can be both unsuccessful and unjustified in psychological research. While rational criteria are useful in philosophy, practical and consequentialist approaches are more commonly emphasized in psychology.

As to emotions that are felt in response to the threat of climate change, certain normative criteria are commonly used and debated. Of these, we particularly focus on anxiety and hope. For example, climate anxiety and worry have been discussed in pathological terms in society, by referring to them as ‘mass neurosis’ or ‘hysteric bursts of emotion’ (Pettersson et al. 2022; Verplanken and Roy 2013). As described in the introduction, this can reflect an intentional mechanism to shift away the focus from the object of the emotional attitude, to the emotional component of the message or the mental stability of the messenger. However, it is possible that some indeed consider climate anxiety as a sign of a mental health problem. In our society, emotions and rationality have traditionally been seen as separate, with the latter having a higher status (Damasio 2005; Fischer 1993). Today, anxiety is sometimes portrayed in public debates as a feeling that people (particularly the young) should be protected from (see Pihkala et al. 2020), as was earlier discussed regarding the remarks of Putin in response to Thunberg’s speech.

However, recent research has highlighted these views as simplistic. Emotions are important sources of information and often rational responses to reality (Damasio 2005; Verplanken and Roy 2013). In fact, while 93% of Europeans believe that climate change is a serious problem, governmental responses are widely understood to be inadequate (Special Eurobarometer, 2021, see also Hickman et al., 2021), which would seem to suggest that climate-related anxiety is a rational response to the current situation. Related to this, Bloodhart and colleagues (2019) found that messages framed with negative emotion matched better the participants’ feelings about climate change, and conveyed impressions of the speaker as rational, strong, and caring. In addition, researchers increasingly emphasize that anxiety can involve a variety of emotional and cognitive processes that range from minor and occasional states to more severe and chronic conditions (Sangervo, Jylhä, and Pihkala 2022). Thus, depending on the form climate anxiety takes, it can be considered a rational and potentially adaptive response to a real crisis, or a threat to personal wellbeing and action (Clayton and Karazsia 2020; Ojala et al. 2022; Pihkala et al., 2022; Wullenkord et al. 2021).

The way in which people cope with their climate anxiety also matters. In this context, there has been debate about the appropriateness of climate hope. While individuals need to be able to continue their lives despite the lingering threat, it is not prima facie obvious that hope is a fully appropriate emotional response to the threat of climate change, as suggested in Section 3 above. Based on a psychological consequentialist approach, where emotions are evaluated in terms of what they cause, the concern has been that climate hope may hinder people from understanding the gravity of the crisis and weaken motivation to engage in collective action and support societal change (Hornsey and Fielding 2016). Other researchers argue instead that it is an appropriate emotional reaction to climate change. The idea here is that hope is a highly complex emotion, the experience of which is a mixture of emotional, cognitive, existential, identity-related, and social aspects (Ojala 2012a, b). According to this account, people may feel hope even in very serious and desperate circumstances – or perhaps precisely because of the desperate circumstances. Without a risk of future harm, there would be no reason for hope. Thus, while there might be a sense in which hope is irrational or non-fitting, hope might still be appropriate in another sense, since it can motivate efforts to improve the situation and mitigate the seriousness of climate change (Bury, Wenzel, and Woodyatt 2020; Geiger et al. 2021; Ojala 2012a, b). This is consistent with recent findings showing that when people are hopeful about how life will be like in the future, they are more willing to sacrifice for the sake of future generations (Fairbrother et al. 2021).

Indeed, Ojala (2012b; 2015) has found that individuals’ engagement with climate action is more common when they feel ‘constructive hope’, which is closely related to efficacy beliefs and trust, in combination with worry. More specifically, constructive hope entails coping through positive reappraisal/cognitive restructuring whereby the problem is acknowledged, but people can switch their perspective by for example acknowledging some positive trends in mitigation or trusting in our collective ability and willingness to address the problem (Ojala, 2012b). In other words, rather than merely focusing on emotions, it is fruitful to assess the appropriateness of the coping strategies that are used to manage them (Ojala, 2022). If negative emotions are managed by de-emphasizing the threat, this allows experiencing hope based on denial, but can lead to decreased engagement with the climate issue, and it does not seem to promote wellbeing either (Marlon et al., 2019; Ojala, 2013). Importantly, from this point of view, constructive hope would seem to be a highly appropriate climate emotion based on both rationality-based and consequentialist criteria, if society and those in power engage in climate mitigation.

Our emotional reactions can also be seen as a response directed towards our personal and collective role in contributing to climate change. These considerations are present in the current debate; e.g., it is relatively common to consider that public discussion blames ordinary people (Lehtonen et al. 2020). The shaming trends recently popularized in Swedish culture and media during the last couple of years, including the so-called ‘flightshame’ (flygskam) (Wolrath Söderberg and Wormbs 2019), are some instances of this. Some may think that it is fitting to feel bad because this may be a necessary first step in environmental awareness. Shame and guilt are moral self-conscious emotions and, while painful, the ability to experience them (at ‘healthy’ levels) promotes considerate relationships and enables a benevolent society by inhibiting maladaptive behaviours. But should we really aim at deliberately attempting to make people feel guilt and shame for their contribution to high-emitting practices?

One way to find an answer to this question is by looking more closely at what these two emotions entail. Shame and guilt are often used synonymously, but there are some crucial differences between them (Tangney, Stuewig, and Mashek 2007). Shame is a feeling that targets the whole ‘self’ and creates a sense of worthlessness and helplessness, which can induce unconstructive responses such as avoidance, blaming, and antagonism (Tangney et al. 1992). There is no clear evidence suggesting that the anticipation of shame would induce pro-environmental behaviour. Interviews of Swedish people who had stopped flying revealed that their decision was not based on shame, but rather on increased knowledge and insights about the climate crisis (Woltrath Söderberg and Wormbs, 2019). In line with these findings, climate-related flight shame seems to be rare and more consistently associated with personal norms (experienced moral obligation to avoid flying) than with social norms (perception that people think one ought to be ashamed or embarrassed about flying) (Doran et al. 2021).

Guilt, on the other hand, does not target the core-self and identity of an individual. Thus, it does not tend to lead to defensive reactions, can foster other-oriented empathy and motivation for reparative action (Tangney, Stuewig, and Mashek 2007), and is also linked with pro-environmental behaviour (Shipley et al., 2022). This highlights an important psychological aspect: people generally want to do the ‘right’ thing and act pro-socially. When they do, they may feel pride and enjoyment, sometimes referred to as ‘warm glow’ (Andreoni, 1990). In line with this, people feel good when acting on climate change, and in this case, anticipation of this feeling can motivate climate-friendly behaviour (Jia & van der Linden, 2020). At the same time, though, in our carbon-intense society individuals have only a few options to make a concrete impact on climate mitigation, while there is also resistance to lifestyle changes. Hence, people may not want to or be able to change their behaviour even if they feel they should.

Our collective and political failures to respond sufficiently to the climate threat are yet another object of emotional reaction. Related to this, the unequal distribution of risks and benefits can induce different emotions across society. Climate change is caused by wealthy nations and individuals, while other groups risk facing the most acute consequences of it (e.g. Althor, Watson, and Fuller 2016; Schlosberg et al., 2014). Furthermore, the groups at risk do not have much influence: disadvantaged people have rarely been heard in climate negotiations (Schlosberg 2013), the future generations and non-human animals have no possibility of raising their voices or talking about their feelings, and the young have limited options to influence climate policy. These aspects can induce a variety of emotions, among which we focus on anger.

When people face or detect injustices, this can trigger anger, which is also a highly activating feeling that can be needed for correcting injustices (see, e.g. Stanley et al. 2021). As the exchange described in Section 2 revealed, Thunberg expresses intense anger and disappointment due to the persistent delay in climate change mitigation. Her request to recognise the threat and injustice behind climate change is a common feature of the angry political rhetoric employed by historical figures like Baldwin, Malcom X, Catherine MacKinnon and Angela Davis, whose anger can be seen as ‘a swift and often automatic conversion of sentiment into word’ (Srinivasan 2018, 140). Both Trump and Putin had the power to speed up mitigation, but instead of expressing an intention to do this, they dismissed Thunberg’s anger and its causes. The inadequacy of political responses has made some people feel powerless, frustrated, and even betrayed (Hickman et al. 2021).

One reason for the emotional disagreement could be the multitude of threats that the issue poses, not only directly through the changing weather and ecological patterns, but also through the economic and social changes that need to be implemented for mitigation. Perhaps, to fully understand the different reasons to feel threatened and angry, it should be acknowledged that some will be more harmed by solutions to climate change than others. For example, those with high-emitting jobs may risk losing their jobs, economic investments in the fossil-fuel industry will decline, and those who have comitted themselves to denying the climate threat will risk losing their credibility and social status. It is in this context that Thunberg’s and other climate advocates’ claims can be perceived by some as a threat. As climate change intensifies, new emotional disagreements and emotional reactions are likely to occur. We leave those for future investigation.

6. Conclusion

The landscape of climate emotions is broad and complex, with different emotions being elicited in different people to different degrees. This gives rise to an additional, yet undertheorized layer of disagreement among the public: there is division of opinion not only about what should be believed regarding climate change, but also about how we should emotionally react to it.

In this paper, we have tried to clarify this disagreement by examining the normativity of climate emotions and the different reasons in favour of different affective reactions to climate change. For that, we provided an overview of the main normative criteria for the evaluation of emotions existing in the philosophical and the psychological literature, including fittingness, warrant, and considerations of prudence from philosophy, and clinical, consequentialist, and contextual considerations from psychology. We used these criteria to evaluate some paradigmatic climate emotions, including climate-related hope, anxiety, shame, and in climate emotional dilemmas, like how to feel in the face of increasingly warmer summers. We showed that different normative criteria for the evaluation of these emotions can yield different answers to the question of what is appropriate to feel in the face of climate change, partly depending on how the object of that emotion is specified or individuated (e.g. warmer temperatures alone, or climate change as a whole).

Importantly, we conceived these normative criteria as providing pro-tanto reasons for the appropriateness or inappropriateness of certain climate emotions, and thus conclusions following from these criteria ought not be regarded as all-things-considered judgements about the ‘validity’ of these emotions. The appropriateness, relevance, or salience of these normative criteria for the evaluation of emotions will be determined, among other things, by the social norms operating in different social contexts. If we are to engage in the project of eliciting different climate emotions (in which we’ve shown we are already immersed), it is important to note that emotions do not exist isolated from the individuals who experience them. Thus, the contributing value of a given emotion will vary depending on, for example, personality dispositions and other simultaneous emotions the individual may hold. So, there should be room for including considerations about individual differences and limitations in emotional responsivity to the normative assessment. The same way as people may engage in the type of climate action that suits them best, different emotional states may serve some people better than others. Additionally, at the population level, we may not need everyone across the board to feel equally hopeful or equally angry. We can also speculate that some emotions are more natural and beneficial to certain societal actors than to others, like perhaps ‘hopeful pessimism’ to philosophers, and ‘constructive hope’ to educators. More interdisciplinary research can help to provide evidence-based guide on the appropriateness of different emotions at the population level.

In sum, the aim of the normative exercise developed in this paper was to provide tools for the better understanding of one’s and others’ climate emotions. Emotional disagreements as the ones becoming more predominant in the public debate and the eventual judgment (public or internal) or sanctions that may follow from this disagreement, have potential consequences at the individual and social level. Negative feelings arising from the inappropriateness of one’s emotions may hinder motivation for action and negatively impact self-esteem. Emotional disagreement, judgment, and eventual sanctioning (in the form of public shaming, gossiping, ostracism, etc.) can potentially hinder our already fragile trust that others be appropriately motivated to act. This is problematic, given the role of trust in cooperation and collective action, much needed to solve the climate crisis. It is possible to alleviate some of these consequences, we argue, if we come to terms with the complex nature of climate emotions and their normative justification.

Acknowledgments

This paper is the winner of the 2021 PERITIA Prize on the subject of the social and political significance of emotional attitudes and emotional responses, awarded as part of the 2021 IJPS Robert Papazian essay competition on the area of Ethics and Emotions. The PERITIA Essay Prize is funded by the UCD Centre for Ethics in Public Life. The winning essays reflect some of the main themes and interests of the project Policy, Expertise and Trust in Action (PERITIA). PERITIA has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870883. We are grateful to Krister Bykvist, Maria Ojala, and Tim Campbell for reading and providing valuable comments to an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The work on this paper was supported by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (Grant No M170372:1) and the Swedish Research Council (Grant No 2018-00782).

Notes

¹ For an account of ‘tone policing’, see Ijeoma Oluo’s So you want to talk about race (2018). Her reconstruction of the use of this fallacy is rooted in the observed relations of power, privilege, and racism behind the silencing practices toward black rights activists. We expand the philosophical analysis on the dismissal of fitting climate anger in Section 3 below.

² The challenge here is how to explain this evaluative relationship in a non-circular manner. For a thorough discussion of this challenge see Bykvist (2009).

³ We focus on warmer summer days for simplicity, although something akin could be argued of warmer winter days.

⁴ Our translation.

⁵ Similarly, regarding warmer winter days: ‘Is it okay to enjoy the warm winters of climate change?’ (The Atlantic, February 23, 2017) and ‘You can care about climate change and still enjoy freakishly warm winter days’ (The Washington Post, March 2, 2017).

⁶ One may argue that affective dilemmas of the sort described here can be reduced to traditional moral act dilemmas. In this way, the conflict individuals are presented with is simply a conflict between whether to go out and enjoy the sun or whether to stay at home, and thus are a conflict between two actions both of which seem equally permissible, but where only one can be chosen (where the status quo is not an option). The type of dilemmas we present here differ from traditional moral dilemmas and thus cannot be subsumed to those. In affective dilemmas, what individuals are primarily uncertain about is what is permissible or appropriate to feel in a given situation, and thus face a situation of what we could refer to as ‘affective uncertainty’. The nature of this affective uncertainty is partly epistemic and partly moral.

⁷ For a thorough discussion of this phenomenon, see Cullity’s Concern, Respect, and Cooperation (Part II: ‘Moral Derivations’, pp. 67–172).

⁸ It should be clarified that even in milder regions, temperatures currently reach levels that can cause physical health problems and strong discomfort among some parts of the population.

⁹ For a contrasting approach to the structure of reasons, see Dancy’s Moral Reasons (1993). In his account, relevant reasons cannot be atomised in the way done above. The causal etiology of an event, i.e., the fact that e.g., it is achieved through immoral means, can undermine or ‘disable’ the event from being reason-given. Think of sadistic pleasure. The fact that a pleasurable activity is sadistic disables pleasure in this context from being reason-giving. So, there is no further reason against the promotion of pleasurable sadistic activities that ‘outweighs’ the reason based on the pleasure, because there is no pleasure-based reason in the first place. However, had the pleasurable activity been an innocent one, the fact that is pleasurable would have been reason-giving. The same kind of reasoning can be suggested to apply to warmer summers caused by climate change. The fact that warmer summers are caused by climate change disables, so the argument goes, the pleasurableness of the warmth from being reason-giving, so there is no further reason that outweighs the pleasure-based reason, since there is no pleasure-based reason in the first place. We thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this analogy. While we might agree that sadism, if intrinsically bad, can disable the pleasure from sadistic pleasurable activities from being reason-giving, it is less clear that climate change, both instrumentally bad and good, can disable warming temperatures resulting from climate change from being reason-giving in terms of pleasure.

¹⁰ Var der Lugt (2021) provides a thorough historical overview of the origins of philosophical pessimism. Drawing from the work of historical philosophical pessimists like Hume or Kant, she argues that in the ‘dark times’ of climate change and environmental degradation that haunt humanity, we should not think about optimism and pessimism as dichotomic notions, but rather as complementary.

¹¹ For the original distinction between fittingness and warrant, see (D’Arms and Jacobson 2000).

¹² This is compatible with there being individuals who will consider current warmer days as unpleasant, or even suffer a range of physical and mental-health consequences due to heat (see, e.g. Clayton, 2020). Moreover, we focus on current temperatures, but we acknowledge that when the temperatures rise more in the future, the effects will become more salient and widespread across more regions.

¹³ Italics added for emphasis.

¹⁴ For an analysis of climate anger and affective injustice, see Mosquera & Jylhä (forthcoming).

¹⁵ An extensive study into climate emotions in Finland found that, for example, 58% of the population expressed that they feel interest regarding climate change, and that feelings such as frustration (44%), powerlessness (39%), and hope (36%) are relatively widespread (Hyry 2021). Anxiety (25%) and shame (18%), commonly debated climate emotions, were also expressed by many.

¹⁶ In certain mental illnesses, for example in depression and other mood disorders, individual’s emotional patterns are intensified or reduced. Psychotic episodes and other altered states of consciousness can induce emotions that do not match the outer world. And finally, personality disorders can include emotional patterns that deviate from the normative expectations in society, such as is the case with the lower sense of remorse and empathy in antisocial personality disorder.