Abstract
What responsibilities does each of us have to reduce or limit our greenhouse gas emissions? Advocates of individual emissions reductions acknowledge that there are limits to what we can reasonably demand from individuals. Climate ethics has not yet systematically explored those limits. Instead, it has become popular to suggest that such judgements should be ‘context-sensitive’ but this does not tell us what role different contextual factors should play in our moral thinking. The current approach to theory development in climate ethics is not likely to be the most effective way to fill this gap. In existing work, climate ethicists use hypothetical cases to consider what can be reasonably demanded of individuals in particular situations. In contrast, ‘climate ethics with an ethnographic sensibility’ uses qualitative social science methods to collect original data in which real individuals describe their own situations. These real-life cases are more realistic, more detailed and cover a broader range of circumstances than hypothetical cases. Normative analysis of real-life cases can help us to develop a more systematic understanding of the role that different contextual factors should play in determining individual climate responsibilities. It can also help us to avoid the twin dangers of ‘idealization’ and ‘special pleading’.
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Notes
In this article, we follow the path that is commonly taken in discussions of what can be reasonably demanded of individuals by focussing on the role of legitimate concerns about personal or familial well-being. However, a full account of our individual climate responsibilities might need to consider how personal consumption responsibilities (or individual climate responsibilities more generally) should be weighed against (or reconciled with) other moral responsibilities to distant strangers, such as those suffering as a result of war, oppression, discrimination or poverty, and special moral responsibilities to friends, compatriots and others with whom we have special relationships.
Some authors (for example, Peeters et al. 2015 and Vanderheiden 2008) have referred to Shue’s (1993, 2001) seminal distinction between subsistence emissions and luxury emissions to determine which emissions reductions can be reasonably demanded of individuals. More specifically, while it is unreasonable to demand that people forego emissions needed to reach subsistence (including adequate food, water and shelter), they should at the very least reduce emissions that would unambiguously classify as luxury emissions (for example, profligate energy consumption, or the excessive consumption of animal products). However, this distinction involves an important line-drawing problem, and even though both extremes of the continuum between subsistence and luxury emissions might be clear, many emissions fall in the grey area between these extremes. What classifies as subsistence or luxury emissions also depends on contextual factors and personal circumstances, and we will argue below that such factors and circumstances can be most appropriately analysed by adopting an ethnographic sensibility in climate ethics. In addition, Meyer and Sanklecha (2011) argue that many people have the expectation that they will be able to continue certain activities, even if these result in a high level of greenhouse gas emissions. Under certain conditions, the authors argue, this expectation can be legitimate, but they also acknowledge the difficulty of distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate expectations. Illegitimate expectations might be understood as a type of special pleading. We argue that adopting an ethnographic sensibility can help us to distinguish legitimate excusing conditions from special pleading (see “Special Pleading and Three Problems of Idealization in Climate Ethics” section).
We have omitted a footnote from the quotation.
We might think of this research programme as seeking to identify principles that should govern each individual’s emissions-generating behaviour. The principles may be at different levels of generality (i.e., relate to more or less common contextual factors), may be more or less important and may be combined in different ways (e.g., some may take priority over others while others can be weighed against each other).
There is a substantial body of work across the social sciences on pro-climate behaviour and the factors that promote it and prevent it (Gifford and Nilsson 2014). Social scientists have used a variety of methods to examine the factors that affect pro-climate behaviour. In the simplest terms, we might distinguish methods that produce quantitative data, such as social surveys, from methods that produce qualitative data, such as interviews, focus groups, diaries and observational research.
Worth remembering in this context is the declaration of former U.S. President George Bush at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro that ‘the American lifestyle is not up for negotiation’ (quoted in Singer 2002, p. 2).
We can expect that research participants will reveal their beliefs about a wide range of issues, including many issues that have been studied by natural and social scientists. Normative analysis will draw on work in other disciplines to identify beliefs that are not consistent with plausible background theories. However, normative analysis might also suggest that some types of empirical error are morally excusable and there may be circumstances in which excusably erroneous beliefs excuse emissions-generating behaviours. We discuss the problem of idealizing assumptions about cognitive competence below.
We used a very short on-line survey promoted to a wide range of groups on social media using the headline, “How hard is it to save the world?” In the advertisement, we explained the project and what we wanted research participants to do and we asked for volunteers. We used the survey to collect some basic demographic data—specifically, gender, age, occupation, income, education and location—to identify and recruit participants whose circumstances were likely to vary in ways that might be morally interesting (Büchs and Schnepf 2013). However, our aim was not to recruit a representative sample of the population—or even of a subset of the population—but rather, in accordance with the ethnographic sensibility we have adopted, to develop a series of qualitative case studies of real people talking about their ordinary moral decisions.
Our on-line survey was completed by 254 people between 22nd January and 17th August 2018. Of these, 159 people volunteered to take part in the project. We selected 36 participants for the study, of whom 27 completed all three parts of the project.
We were interested in personal circumstances that might have a significant effect on an individual’s life by influencing the opportunities, constraints and incentive structures in which they make choices. We explored the behaviours of research participants by asking them to talk about what they did during a ‘typical day’, how that varies from day-to-day, and asking them to tell us about significant events and purchases over the last year or planned for the coming year. Finally, we asked participants to tell us what they thought about climate change.
We asked them to make between seven and fourteen diary entries over two weeks reflecting on something that they had done or not done. We kept the number of diary entries quite low to promote completion. Future studies might experiment with research designs that demand more from participants in order to collect even more detailed accounts.
We recognise that some participants will have provided what they believed to be socially acceptable accounts. However, our aim is to see what we can learn by considering whether the actions they describe are morally permissible for someone in the circumstances that they describe. If they have misrepresented either their actions or their circumstances, our moral judgements will be about a ‘hypothetical’ rather than a ‘real’ case. We believe that these ‘hypothetical’ cases are likely to be close enough to ‘real’ cases to retain many of the benefits that we set out in the previous sections.
We have used two approaches to the data to select case studies for development. The first approach is wholly intuitive. We have carefully reviewed the data to identify what we believe are interesting moral problems. Using this approach, we have identified cases that raise interesting questions about individual responsibility for climate change in real-life situations. The second approach is more systematic. We developed a coding framework for the interview data and the diary entries. The coding framework reflected the purposes of the research and was refined in light of repeated reading of the data. The basic elements of the coding framework were actions, circumstances, and justifications for action or excusing conditions. We tried to code using participants’ own language rather than imposing categories from the literature. Using this approach, we were able to identify both commonalities and contrasts between participants’ circumstances, choices and moral reasoning. As a result, we were able to develop case studies that raise different moral issues.
We have used pseudonyms for our research participants.
The quotations in this paragraph are taken from the interviews with Roger.
Further elaboration of our argument might draw on relevant background theories, such as work in psychology that seeks to explain how perceived constraints limit (pro-environmental) behaviour (Ajzen 1991).
As we saw in “Hypothetical Cases and Theory Development in Climate Ethics” section, the best hypothetical examples do provide some level of detail. Moreover, it is possible to add more detail to hypothetical examples. However, the selection of details for hypothetical cases may be arbitrary or skewed to the experiences or reading of the climate ethicist. The hypothetical approach to case development seems less likely to generate the broad range of realistic cases that might be developed from a well-designed programme of ethnographic studies.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the guest editors for the opportunity to include our paper in this special issue. We would like to thank the audience of the MANCEPT workshop for their helpful comments. We are especially grateful to Laura García Portela and Lieske Voget-Kleschin for their extremely detailed comments, which have greatly improved the paper.
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Bell, D., Swaffield, J. & Peeters, W. Climate Ethics with an Ethnographic Sensibility. J Agric Environ Ethics 32, 611–632 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-019-09794-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-019-09794-z