Individual Responsibility for Enabling Collective Responsibilities
If collective moral agency is rarely found in cases of environmental injustice, where should we look for the distinctively moral dimension of our responsibility for environmental injustice? One way to begin to broach this question, following Young, is to ask how individuals contribute to the commission of environmental injustice.
The programming account of collective responsibility points to an answer that connects individuals to collective responsibility. If we can effect change in the circumstances that engender environmental injustice by engaging with institutions, we have a prima facie responsibility to do so. We have these direct responsibilities. However, as is often the case, these direct responsibilities do not capture the breadth of our responsibilities. While our individual efforts may not have a significant effect on the reduction of wetlands, on strip mining, on overfishing, or on the institutional environment of Love Canal, the e-waste trade, and climate change, together we might well be able to act to support or generate policies that can have such an effect. In short, in addition to any direct responsibilities we have for our actions as individuals, we have a responsibility to contribute. As institutions constitute shared enterprises, shared means of coordination and cooperation that are affected by our efforts, they provide a means of influencing the conditions supportive of environmental injustice. But can the effort of a single individual to affect our institutional environment be sufficient to respond to the structural challenges of environmental injustice? Some might find this doubtful.On one common line of thinking, if an individual action does not directly affect a harmful outcome, or is not otherwise independently prohibited or permitted, then that individual cannot have a responsibility not to perform that action (Sinott-Armstrong, 2005).
However, I suggest this account of responsibility is much too limited (Shockley, 2016). In addition to such direct responsibilities we should think of our ability to bring about change in terms of the indirect effects we might have if we act through intermediaries, in this case, institutions. We can see this anticipated in Young’s (2013, pp. 106—113; see also 2006) shift from thinking about responsibility as culpability to thinking in terms of our ability to influence our social environment. While individuals may have difficulty effecting change alone, they can leverage their shared responsibilities and coordinate efforts to influence their institutional environment through shared practices and expectations of one another. The contributory approach advocated here allows us to think of responsibility in terms of how we might positively alter the background conditions that support structural injustice, generally through our ability to influence institutions that mediate between our individual actions and those background conditions that program for structural change. The focus on the moral responsibility of individuals to make their contribution brings in an explicitly moral dimension, one that bears heavily on all those individuals who share responsibility in virtue of benefitting from an unjust institutional environment.If we could do something to prevent harm and choose not to, this is a failure of moral responsibility: it may well constitute an action worthy of blame. As Chiara Cordelli argues, as individuals we have “prospective duties,” that is,
duties to (i) progressively acquire capacities those agents have never possessed that would enable them to perform beneficent actions in the future and (ii) either pre- ventatively limit the personal costs for themselves of complying with the demands of beneficence in the future or anyway resolve to bear those costs when and if they arise.
(Cordelli, 2018, p. 275)
I suggest that as we might well have duties to develop the required capacities at the individual level, so we have duties to develop the shared capacities at the collective level (see Wringe, 2014 for a similar point). Institutions provide the means of making structural changes, and so provide a means of enacting shared capacities.
Formalizing these institutions into organizations or political institutions that can be collective agents — and, given the additional criteria noted above, morally responsible collective agents — provides a means of leveraging shared responsibility and institutional control to respond to structural injustice. The ability of the citizenry of Love Canal to organize, to develop an organization capable of collective action, provides a means of making changes in the institutional environment, and to counteract, to some extent, the environmental injustice inflicted upon them. The ability to organize gave them voice, and their organized voice “programmed” change in their institutional environment. Similarly, given our tacit involvement in the institutions that support e-waste traffic and climate change, we have a prospective, forward directed duty, one that may well involve blame if it is not suitably discharged, to develop the organizations and make the requisite changes in our institutional environment (Wringe, 2014). The ubiquity and capacity of institutions to address group-level concerns makes possible responses to injustices in our institutional environment, despite our seeming individual impotence and the lack of collective agents. And failing to so enact responses constitutes a failure to satisfy our collective responsibilities (Gardiner, 2017, p. 30ff).But even if we cannot reasonably or practically develop collective agents, we might still be able to effect change in our institutional environment. Many of us bear contributory responsibility in cases where harm, or injustice, arises from structural problems in our social world (Shockley, 2016). In this indirect sense, then, we are responsible for environmental injustice. With the focus on contributory responsibility and the mediating role of institutions, there is a way of connecting the agency of individuals with a means of recourse for structural harms and other concerns to collective phenomena that are generally out of the conceptual or practical range of individuals.
One way in which moral responsibility for environmental justice arises is through individual responsibilities to engage with those institutions (potential or actual) that provide a means of indirectly affecting the structural injustices at the center of environmental justice concerns. The place for moral responsibility in cases where there is no collective agent to bear moral culpability is with individuals who could contribute to the resolution of a response to those harms. Moreover, failing to have generated an institutional structure, say a political regime capable of responding to climate change, constitutes a shared responsibility, a backward directed shared responsibility. We can hold shared responsibilities for changes to our institutional environment that we should have made.While we do not have unilateral control over these institutions, they do provide a means of accessing the conditions that generate environmental injustice, and together we can change them, reform them, and use them. If we acknowledge there is some capacity to make change, even if not certain or not under our direct control, we are prospectively responsible for making those changes we can. Indeed, this is one response to Jamieson’s thought that we might ruin the world without anyone being morally responsible. We are responsible to pursue those options we are able to pursue, and for not having pursued the options that were available to us. And this is a moral responsibility, even if indirect, that complements our more direct moral responsibilities for what we have done and what we do. In many cases, climate change being a clear example, we may not be able to have much of an effect as individuals alone, but, we can have an effect on political institutions and other points of policy leverage.
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