Taking Responsibility for Climate Change by Säde Hormio

Author:Säde Hormio
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783031517532
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024

S. HormioTaking Responsibility for Climate Changehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51753-2_4

4. Shared Social Orientation and Responsibility as Constituents

Säde Hormio1, 2

(1)Practical Philosophy, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

(2)Institute for Future Studies, Stockholm, Sweden

Säde Hormio

Email: [email protected]

Unorganised Collectives

Collectives of various stripes bear responsibility for climate change, be they states, international bodies, corporations, or other collective entities. In the previous chapters, I focussed on organised collectives, arguing that collective agents of all kinds should take climate change into consideration in their operations. Nevertheless, climate change can be construed as a question of collective responsibility not only from the viewpoint of collective agents bearing responsibility for it, but also from the viewpoint of how the problem itself is inherently collective. Therefore, in discussions on collective responsibility for climate change, ‘collective’ can refer to the entity causing the harm (and/or bearing responsibility for it), or to the problem of climate change itself (Hormio 2023). This second way to conceptualise climate change as a question of collective responsibility focuses on how it is a harm that has been caused collectively and can only be solved collectively. Collective action problem is an aggregation of individual actions that produce an outcome not intended at the level of an individual action. It cannot be solved by any one agent acting unilaterally because remedial action must be enacted and supported by numerous agents.

Collective action problems like climate change raise questions of shared responsibility. We contribute to collective outcomes not only as members of collective agents (see Chap. 3), but also as constituents of unorganised collectives, that is, aggregates of people without an established decision-making structure. I use the word ‘constituent’ (Hormio 2017), because there are no differentiated roles, or rules for entering and exiting membership in the way that there are for organised collectives. Instead, the unorganised collectives that are interesting in terms of moral responsibility are a set of individuals who are picked out by some normatively relevant fact. With the collective harm of climate change, the normatively relevant fact could be about things like the ecological footprint linked to one’s consuming habits (e.g., ‘daily consumers of dairy products’ or ‘frequent fliers’). The normatively relevant fact could also be about the potential of the constituents to do something good together, like ‘local government procurement officials across the country’. Other unorganised collectives relevant for climate change responsibility include aggregates such as ‘livestock farmers’ and ‘PR professionals helping the fossil fuel industry’.

This chapter focuses on shared responsibility as constituents of unorganised collectives. What is common for morally interesting unorganised collectives is that their activity is interdependent and based on shared values to some degree. Constituents can sometimes simply opt out, but this is easier with some unorganised collectives than others. One can quite easily stop consuming dairy every day, but changes that require rethinking one’s professional life or livelihood is a much taller order. In these cases, what is called for is collective awareness raising about harmful practices and possibly changing these the norms around these with other constituents.

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