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Abstract
Environmental ethicists have not reached a consensus about whether or not individuals who contribute to climate change have a moral obligation to reduce their personal greenhouse gas emissions. In this paper, I side with those who think that such individuals do have such an obligation by appealing to the concept of integrity. I argue that adopting a political commitment to work toward a collective solution to climate change—a commitment we all ought to share—requires also adopting a personal commitment to reduce one’s emissions. On these grounds, individuals who contribute to climate change have a prima facie moral duty to lower their personal greenhouse gas emissions. After presenting this argument and supporting each of its premises, I defend it from two major lines of objection: skepticism about integrity’s status as a virtue and concerns that the resulting moral duty would be too demanding to be morally required. I then consider the role that an appeal to integrity could play in galvanizing the American public to take personal and political action regarding climate change.
Acknowledgements
I thank those who attended an earlier presentation of this paper at a group meeting of the International Society for Environmental Ethics at the 2013 Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, especially Dan Shahar, Mark Budolfson, and Allen Thompson. Those discussions played a crucial role in expanding and refining the paper. I also extend special thanks to John Nolt and Andrew Light, who both provided insightful comments on earlier drafts, and to two anonymous reviewers whose comments helped clarify and improve many of the paper’s arguments.
Notes
1. The most comprehensive accounts of the effects of GCC are the reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). For the most recent report on the impacts of GCC, see Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (Citation2014).
2. Johnson later retracted this claim. See Johnson (Citation2011).
3. Non-Harm and No-Difference are meaningfully different claims: it is possible to endorse Non-Harm without endorsing No-Difference and vice versa. Suppose one rejects Non-Harm—she believes that her GHG emissions do cause harm. She might still believe that she lacks a duty to reduce her individual GHG emissions because she does not think her individual emissions reductions will help solve the problem. (Perhaps she thinks, following Hale (Citation2011), that all fossil fuels will inevitably be burned regardless of her individual choices.) She rejects Non-Harm but still denies an obligation to reduce her GHG emissions because she upholds No Difference. In contrast, suppose one rejects No Difference—she believes that her individual GHG emissions reductions could make a difference in solving the problem of climate change. She might still believe that she is under no obligation to reduce her GHG emissions. She could believe that her emissions do not cause harm and that reducing them is therefore supererogatory. She rejects No Difference but still denies an obligation to reduce her GHG emissions because she upholds Non-Harm.
4. To give some recent examples, John Broome (Citation2012) and John Nolt (Citation2011) both argue that individual lifetime emissions cause substantial harm. Nolt (Citation2013) also argues in a follow-up article that emissions reductions by individuals could make a significant difference in lowering US national emissions if certain minimally demanding, emissions-reducing behaviors were adopted. Anne Schwenkenbecher (Citation2014) provides a detailed critique of all three claims.
5. In fact, the centrality of Non-Harm to these discussions has resulted in entire articles devoted just to determining how we should understand the harm of climate change (e.g. Hartzell-Nichols, Citation2012).
6. Sandberg (Citation2011) is not as explicit about whether he believes we also have this duty, but he views his project as an expansion and defense of Sinnott-Armstrong’s position and at times stresses the need for a response to climate change to focus on lines of action that are more likely to make a difference to solving the problem than reducing individual emissions (p. 247). Thus, it seems reasonable to assume he also endorses the claim that individuals have this general political obligation.
7. Compensation is discussed far less frequently than mitigation and adaptation, but it is clear that there will be populations (particularly in the developing world) who are unjustly harmed by climate change and that they deserve to be compensated for these harms.
8. There is also an error-theoretic account that suggests integrity is not a virtue at all and an account of integrity as an epistemic virtue. The dominant view is that integrity is a moral virtue, which implies that most analyses of integrity assume both the error-theoretic and epistemic accounts of integrity are false. My own account of integrity will bypass issues about what particular account of integrity is correct, but my later remarks about integrity’s value can be interpreted as an argument against the error-theoretic account.
9. As this phrasing suggests, it is possible to read Resoluteness in a robust way that encompasses Stickiness, but the convention in the literature has been to separate these traits.
10. It is worth noting that Moral Sanity, even if required, would not threaten the Integrity Argument because working toward a solution to climate change is a morally worthy cause. Moreover, even those who think individuals are not obligated to reduce their individual GHG emissions believe that such reductions are morally permissible (except in odd cases where doing so brings significant harm to others).
11. This is particularly important with respect to GHG emissions because most developed countries (especially the consumerist United States) present many temptations for frivolously increasing one’s individual emissions, sometimes without even receiving any meaningful benefit from doing so.
12. The relative scarcity of explicit discussion of integrity in classic virtue ethics literature also contributes to this problem, as noted by Audi and Murphy (Citation2006, pp. 3–4).
13. This is especially true in the literature on business ethics. See Audi and Murphy (Citation2006, pp. 7–8).
14. Hill (Citation1979) examines acts of symbolic protest from a more deontological perspective; my borrowing of his case does not mean that I read him as endorsing my integrity-based analysis.
15. Cognitive discipline is a well-established psychological phenomenon in which the recognition of inconsistent beliefs or attitudes creates a feeling of discomfort. Typically, this discomfort motivates individuals to resolve the inconsistency. For the classic psychological studies on cognitive dissonance, see Festinger and Carlsmith (Citation1959) and Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter (Citation1964).
16. In the earlier example of the Nazi protestor, it is specified that the woman’s protests will not make a difference to stopping the Nazi regime. A reviewer notes that a positive appraisal of the woman’s actions is difficult to explain when the Integrity Argument in part depends on refuting No Difference. My appraisal of the woman’s actions is that they are supererogatory: it is morally praiseworthy for the protestor to voice opposition to these immoral activities, but if it is genuinely impossible for her actions to contribute to solving the problem, then she cannot have a moral obligation to engage in these protests. Remember that this example was only meant to provide an explanation of why we should accept the claim that integrity is valuable; the behavior in this case is not claimed to be morally obligatory. However, the Integrity Argument is trying to establish that something is morally obligatory, and that is why No Difference must be addressed. If the argument only aimed at establishing that reducing GHG emissions were a morally good thing to do, then it might not be necessary to refute No Difference: symbolic stands like those of the Nazi protestor seem to have a unique kind of moral value. But I am not sure that this aspect of integrity’s value can ground a moral obligation to perform actions that do nothing to stop the moral wrongs that are being done.
The reviewer also suggests that an obligation to reduce GHG emissions could arise—even if No Difference were not refuted—from a duty to refrain from contributing to the harm of climate change. In fact, this strategy has recently been pursued by Travis Rieder (Citation2016), who grounds some of our moral obligations to reduce our individual carbon footprints in a duty not to contribute to massive, systematic harms (pp. 26–29). However, since this paper deliberately tries to bypass issues surrounding the harm caused by individual GHG emissions, this line of argument must be pursued and critiqued elsewhere.
17. I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this concern.
18. This position is similar in spirit to Ty Raterman’s (Citation2012) view on the extent to which individuals are obligated to live in environmentally sustainable ways.
19. A stubborn objector might argue that they can maintain integrity without reducing emissions simply by staying ignorant about climate change. While that might serve as a means to avoid the collective political commitment, it comes at a high cost: one maintains integrity by cultivating intellectual vices. Exercising moral virtues requires being informed (Jenni, Citation2003; Kawall, Citation2010), and while it is well beyond human capacities to be fully informed about every morally significant event currently occurring, we at least ought to investigate the matters that are most salient and in which we are personally implicated, particularly when the information about these issues is prevalent and can be accessed at low costs to us (Kawall, Citation2010, pp. 111–116). Climate change fits that description; thus, it demands rigorous and dutiful examination. Upon completing that examination in an impartial and objective manner, it should be clear that we have compelling moral reasons to cooperate to work toward a collective, political solution to climate change.
20. I focus on the United States because citizens in the United States are thoroughly divided with regard to their attitudes about global climate change and because the United States’ policies on climate change and willingness to collaborate with other nations will play an enormous role in the success or failure of an attempted global response to climate change. This does not mean, however, that the Integrity Argument cannot be significant in climate change discussions taking place in other nations.
21. Those who typically bike or walk to their destinations are unlikely to carpool or use public transportation frequently, so these figures may not be quite as bad as they seem.
22. I doubt that they would speak in the language of prima facie obligations, but I think they would agree that engaging in emissions-reducing behaviors is something that individuals should generally do.
23. I thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing this objection to my attention.
24. Earlier in the paper, I mentioned that I would not specify in great detail precisely what—beyond responsible voting—the political obligation requires. However, for those worried that voting may be ineffective, involvement in organizations such as Fossil Free or promotion of the initiatives that they advocate may provide an alternate means of adopting the relevant political commitment.
25. McKinnon (Citation2014) offers a related but different argument for why we should not regard our individuals actions as making no difference in with respect to climate change.