Climate Change and individual responsibility: Agency, moral disengagement and the motivational gap

摘要

In spite of the fact that climate change is one of the most important threats of our time, the last 20 years have been marked by inaction at all levels. At the individual level in particular, the behavior change of the global affluent has not been up to the challenge. Given the dire predicted consequences of climate change, how is it that people do not feel ethically compelled to reduce their carbon footprint? The purpose of this book is to scrutinize the moral and psychological reasons underlying this blatant inaction. The authors start from two different explanations for this so-called 'motivational gap.' The first one, mainly advocated by Dale Jamieson (2010), takes it that our common-sense conception of responsibility is ill-equipped to deal with non-paradigmatic moral problems such as climate change. The second explanation, advocated by Stephen Gardiner (2011), is that the moral complexity of climate change renders us vulnerable to moral corruption, which is a tendency to skew our moral judgments and to rationalize our inaction. Peeters et al. argue that even though these two explanations are not mutually exclusive, the second one has more explanatory power. In this line, they then proceed to develop their own explanation of the motivational gap, distinctly based on psychology rather than morality.