Focusing on Institutions
But what are institutions? On one account, institutions are sets of rules, formal or informal, and some shared understanding of those rules that governs actors’ interactions (Young, 2013; Oran Young, 2016; see also Gardiner, 2017).
Frank Hindriks and Francesco Guala provide a helpful characterization of the three most common accounts of institutions:According to the rule-based conception, institutions are behavioral rules that guide and constrain behavior during social interaction, while according to the equilibriumbased conception institutions are equilibria of strategic games. The third account of institutions.... conceives of institutions as systems of constitutive rules that assign statuses and functions to physical entities — for example pieces of paper that are to be used as money.
(2015, p. 461)
The first view has the advantage of providing a descriptively rich characterization of our commonsense notion of institutions such as property or marriage, and the second has the advantage of providing the right sort of incentive structure to capture the way institutions motivate the coordination of individual behavior. The third view, that institutions provide rules for assigning meaning to physical objects, captures the sense that institutions provide a means of (in Searle’s (1995) terms) constructing social reality. Through institutions we can create meaning in objects (e.g., turn a simple piece of paper into money). And through this constructive process we can develop more formal institutions, which here we will call organizations, robust enough to be candidates for collective agency.
As Hindriks and Guala (2015) point out, these positions are not inconsistent (see also Guala, 2016). Following Hindriks and Guala’s analysis, we can take institutions to be systems of rules in equilibria that regulate behavior, provide incentives for those subject to the institution to abide by those systems of rules, and serve as the foundation for more formal organizations (but see Rabinowicz, 2018).
On this conception, institutions provide coordinating control over the behavior of individuals subject to those institutions; this makes them invaluable for explaining group-level behavior. Most importantly for our purposes, to the extent that institutions are ineliminable in our responses to group-level phenomena, particularly in addressing the structural vulnerabilities and group-based exploitation so central to environmental justice, they are a necessary means of satisfying our shared responsibilities. Whether systems oflaw, convention, and practice that allow us to coordinate our action — like the institution of property or the institution of money — or more formal institutions — organizations like the Environmental Protection Agency or nongovernmental organizations — institutions serve as instruments through which we can make changes in the conditions that allow the exploitation of vulnerabilities. Institutions provide a means of causally connecting individual agents to the structural background so central to instances of environmental injustice, and on which Young was so focused.Of course, a causal link between the generation of harms and a collective phenomenon that programs for that harm is not sufficient to attribute collective moral responsibility (List and Pettit, 2011, p. 158). Collective agency is required for that, either in the backward directed sense of being responsible for what it, as a collective, did, or in the forward directed sense of being required, as a collective, to perform some action or effect some change. Following List and Pettit (2011, p. 158) groups are morally responsible agents if they, collectively
(1) face “a normatively significant choice, involving the possibility of doing something good or bad, right or wrong”
(2) have “the understanding and access to evidence required for making normative judgments about the options” and
(3) have “the control required for choosing between the options”
The central idea for our purposes is that for a group (a collective, in the language being used in this chapter) to be morally responsible it must both have the autonomous capacity to make choices and be responsive to those choices in a way that reflects the moral character of the choice.
How and to what extent groups are able to make autonomous choices and respond appropriately to good or bad, right or wrong, is beyond the scope of this chapter (but see Searle, 1995; List and Pettit, 2011; Gilbert, 2013; Tuomela, 2013). However, our more formal institutions and organizations may well be capable of functioning as collective agents. And, as we will see below, developing or generating organizations from our institutions, following the pattern of the citizen response to Love Canal, provides a means of developing responsible agents, and so the possibility of discharging our shared responsibilities through those developed collective agents. To the extent that we are able to be collectively responsible for environmental injustice, it is through these more formal institutions. If shared responsibilities for environmental injustice are ever to be matters of collective moral responsibility — matters of responsibility of a collective — the required collective agents will have to be entities capable of making changes to the institutional environment that makes structural injustice possible.But any responsibility to generate collective agents appears to present a conundrum for the intuition that we have a collective responsibility for environmental justice. Without collective agency we cannot be collectively responsible in a backward directed sense. But then while we might have a shared responsibility to develop organizations or formal institutions capable of being collectively responsible, we cannot have a collective responsibility to do so, at least not without appealing to some other collective agent. Individuals are simply not the right sort of agents. On the other hand Jamieson’s (2012) thought points to our causal impotence with respect to our institutional environment (see also Sinnott-Armstrong, 2005) and so to our seeming inability to be responsive to environmental injustices as individuals. In the face of such impotence we cannot be morally responsible for changes to that environment. In the next section we will explore an alternative that makes this conundrum less troubling.
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