A Kantian Perspective on Individual Responsibility for Sustainability

ABSTRACT

I suggest that the Kantian categorical imperative can be a basis for an ethical duty to live sustainably. The universalizability formulation of the categorical imperative should be seen as a test of whether the principle underlying a way of life is self-destructive of the system of living and acting which makes the way of life possible. In exploring this interpretation the self should be conceptualized as a socially and system-constituted being, rather than an atomized will. In this sense, a self which lives in a way that is destructive of the system of life, is also in principle willing its own self-destruction.

KEYWORDS:

• Kant
• deontological ethics
• sustainability
• responsibility
• anthropocene
• contradiction
• moral duty

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge support for this work by Hofstra University, and by Dartmouth College, where I have been a Visiting Scholar in the Philosophy Department.

Disclosure Statement

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

Correction Statement

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

Notes

1. Like Kant’s imperfect duties, discussed subsequently.

2. Not everyone shares the view that Kant’s ethics is hopelessly anthropocentric. Gillroy (1998) eschews the anthropocentric reading and explores a Kantian basis for environmental duties. Some argue that rational being should not be confined to human (e.g., Korsgaard, 1996, 2018; Wood, 1998) Anderson-Gold (2003) and Hayward (1998) distinguish between ‘anthropocentricism’ and ‘speciesism’. Some have argued that Kantianism, or an emendation thereof, supports duties to (or with regard to) animals (Brown, 2010; Kain, 2010; Svoboda, 2014; Timmerman, 2005). The ‘equivalence’ of different versions of the categorical imperative (Johnson and Cureton 2021) suggests that Kant thought of morality in primarily human and personal terms. Even so there are resources in Kant for conceptualizing a duty to not live unsustainably.

3. Although in a Kantian framework future persons could be regarded as members of the moral community, and therefore, as due the same respect as is due any rational person.

4. A climate scientist’s comment about parenting captures something of the Kantian perspective: ‘[when] people ask her [Kate Marvel], as they often do, whether she is filled with existential dread as a climate scientist and a mother, she tells them emphatically that she is not. Her work has taught her that what matters is what we do right now, and the urgency of that edict leaves no room, no time for despondence. “I think, when a lot of people talk about climate change and having kids, they’re looking to the future and despairing,” she says. “For me, it makes me look at the present and be incredibly resolved.”’ (Gibson, 2020.)

5. See note 2.

6. All references to Kant use the volume and page numbers of the Akademie edition, the standard reference for Kant’s works. ‘G’ stands for the work translated as Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals in Practical Philosophy (Kant, 1966).

7. This is an ‘internal impossibility,’ the mark of a ‘perfect’ duty.

8. Kant has been criticized, with some justification, for ignoring the particularity of human beings. I have made it myself (Wallace, 1993). But, it also misses Kant’s point. If a particular act is my moral duty qua parent, a rational being would recognize it as, if not an absolute duty for any parent, then at least as one that has adequate justificatory reason (since there is latitude in defining imperfect duties consistent with a rational foundation). I’m glossing over many issues that would take us too far afield (e.g., what roles count as morally legitimate – parent presumably does, but being a member of the KKK does not – and how actions ought to be described).

9. Suicide on another basis, such as knowingly choosing one’s own death in the course of fulfilling another duty, would constitute a different maxim from one based on self-love. Suppose a secret service agent throws herself into the line of fire in order to protect the president from being shot. In doing one’s duty, the unfortunate and foreseen result will be one’s death.

10. Each of these defines an imperfect rather than a perfect duty in the Kantian classification; I will return to that distinction.

11. Baatz (2014) argues that individuals, rather than countries or organizations, should be the primary locus of responsibility for sustainability because any individual, regardless of social and economic location, could be an offender. Baatz also argues that it would distort a fair distribution of responsibility if individuals who are not primary offenders were swept up in an assignment of responsibility to collectives. There could also be individuals in developing or undeveloped countries who are living unsustainably and who have a duty to live differently. The affluent elite in a developing country who exploit resources and indiscriminately produce waste, pollution and CO₂ emissions in order to support a lavish life-style are no less guilty merely in virtue of geo-economic location.

12. A resource sufficiency approach could also argue against economic development, on the grounds that raising the standard of living for the poor would irreparably deplete the world’s resources, and for reallocating what we have.

13. These classifications, ‘resource sufficiency’ and ‘functional integrity,’ come from Thompson (1997, 2010).

14. The threat of the earth being hit by an asteroid would be an ‘exogenous’ threat. The distinction between endogenous and exogenous elements could depend on human interest and how the boundaries of the system are defined. Upstream allocation of water from the Colorado River to supply communities in the American southwest led to the drying up of the Colorado River in Mexico, and disrupted what to the Mexican fishing communities was an endogenous element of their way of life. From the point of view of the residents and political interests of the American southwest, the impact on the Mexican fishing communities was regarded (fairly or not) as exogenous to their definition of the system of water allocation.

15. If working and doing the tasks of daily living require driving fossil-fuel powered cars, then the very requirements of participating affordably in the system render the system unsustainable. (Affordability, how necessary driving is, availability of alternatives, and so on could be debated, but fossil fuel dependent transportation is undeniably a crucial, required element of the system as it is currently structured.)

16. For one discussion of obligations to future persons see Kavka (1978). For another view of obligations to future and past generations invoking the notion of lifetime-transcending interests see the work of Janna Thompson (2009, 2016).

17. It would be irrational to will that no one should ever help others (that would entail willing that no one should ever help me when I am in need). Even though for Kant it is not need or welfare per se that is morally compelling, the implication of his view is that we have moral duties to meet people’s needs.

18. Kant understands freedom as ‘noumenal,’ not as something that natural beings can be proven to have in a causal, phenomenal world. However, Kant also argues that we can’t consider ourselves moral beings without thinking of ourselves as free.

19. Sinnott-Armstrong (2010) argues that I have no moral duty because harm is not my fault; Budolfson (2013) that I can’t be morally required to do something that is futile.

20. Related to or an aspect of the many hands or tragedy of the commons problem.

21. See Wallace (2019a) and (Wallace, 2019b) for development of a comprehensive relational theory of the self.

22. Driving in an abandoned, uninhabited place with no other vehicles would be a different act. M. Thompson (2011) uses the interstate highway system as a metaphor in a discussion of situational awareness for ecological duties. A Kantian perspective, he suggests, is a corrective to narcissism, a tendency to ignore the rules. I am arguing that just as system wide rules define duties in a system of driving, so, too, could rules and (enforceable) regulatory frameworks define duties of sustainability.

23. Lane (2011, Chapter 3) also suggests some of these possibilities.

24. I see this as expressing the stoic attitude of harmonizing with nature in one’s local context. ‘For he devotes himself solely to the realization of his own duty, and is always mindful of what is assigned to him from the whole.’ (Marcus, 2011, p. 3:4).

25. What one individual is able to do may be more than one might think. while it may also be a function of convergent socio-economic and political factors. The complex story of the 1997 New York Watershed Memorandum of Agreement illustrates the possibilities as well as the practical, on the ground difficulties of acting in collective coordination systemic contexts. See Soll (2013), whose felicitious phrase ‘political ecology’ captures the systemic context of action.

26. For an individualistic, self-interest based account see Lewis on conventions (Lewis, 1969); on a plural subject see Gilbert (1989, 2008); and for a non-rational, biologically based account see Millikan (2005, 2008).

27. This idea is based on a misconception similar to the one identified by Martin Luther King, who observes that a belief in the inevitability of progress might ‘stem[s] from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively.’ (King, 1963).

28. For example, Leopold (1949), Naess (1973), and Callicott (1989) among others, who argue for the moral value of the ecosystem itself.

29. As noted earlier Gillroy (2000) makes an even stronger argument, that we have a positive duty to establish sustainable moral societies, ones that promote autonomy. Gillroy appeals to a resource sufficiency approach – ‘the long-term empowerment of present and future moral agents’ (p. 183), and to a functional integrity approach, which Gillroy calls an ‘Ecosystem Design Approach’ based on a ‘Resources to Recovery’ model (pp. 289–291).

30. See Speth (2012) for some systemic suggestions.