Owning Up to our Collective Responsibility for Environmental Justice
In this chapter I have argued that moral responsibility for environmental justice is pressed upon us not merely at the level of the direct responsibilities we have for our individual actions, but also at the level of the contributory responsibilities we have to make changes in our institutional environment.
Institutions are the means by which our individual moral responsibilities — spelled out in terms of our capacity to effect change in those structural injustices through our ability to manipulate institutions — are connected to our collective responsibilities — spelled out in terms of the explanatory ineliminability of institutions to resolve group-level, structural injustice. These responsibilities may require that we activate an existing institution or practice, or they may require that we organize or reform institutions that could respond to great environmental injustices. To satisfy forward directed shared responsibilities for responding to structural injustice, we may need to generate collectives, institutions, that are capable of being collectively morally responsible for those changes. If we need moral agency for backward directed responsibility, then we have a shared responsibility to develop those agents in cases where that responsibility is necessary for the prevention of gross injustice. We are responsible not only for failing to use existing institutions to address harms, we are responsible for forming, or failing to have formed, organizations and institutions capable of preventing or mitigating harm and injustice (Wringe, 2014). We need to take ownership of our normative world. We do this by sharing responsibility for our institutions, both those we have made and those we should have made, and using these institutions to program for structural change.In this limited sense of collective responsibility is it fair to say environmental justice is a matter of collective responsibility? It would seem so.
While the moral dimensions of our responsibilities are generally held by individuals, they are only expressed through collective enterprises: the causal connection to effecting change in environmental justice takes place through the capacity of our shared and coordinated activities to program for change in our institutional environment. How does the programming account help us satisfy the responsibility we have (as individuals) to take responsibility (as a group)? By providing a means of channeling our shared responsibilities into the institutions that program for injustice or justice. The causal conduit provided by institutions provides a way of bypassing the seeming causal impotence of individual moral agents in the face of structural injustice. It provides a way of explaining how together we can take control, even if only on occasion. While the moral weight of such responsibilities is held by the individuals who share the responsibility, the focus of the responsibility — what it is a responsibility for — is a matter of collective concern. While this should come as no surprise, it does point to the importance of relying on shared efforts and shared responsibilities to generate collective responses, particularly to generate responses that support policy initiatives and effect other changes to practices and cultural norms at the level of groups. As Eckersley reminded us, matters of structural injustice are matters of collective concern; they are group- level phenomena. Even if we do not have full blooded collective moral responsibility, the causal levers for making structural changes are often at the level of collectives, and are best approached through the controlling influence of groups whether loosely coordinated through institutions or more formally orchestrated through organizations. Moral responsibility in such cases falls on individuals not only through their individual actions, but also through their contributory responsibilities, often taking the form of shared responsibilities, to engage with or develop these institutions capable of responding to environmental injustice.While this might seem just as fraught as claiming that we have individual responsibility for preventing large-scale harms — for it is difficult to see how one person can be obliged to do something that in most cases is beyond their capacity — we have made some progress. We have expanded the scope of responsibility beyond direct individual responsibility in a way that recognizes our role in our institutional environment, and the shared and collective effects of our actions. By focusing on the way aggregate actions might generate institutional change we provide a place for the voice of populations to make a difference in their institutional environment.
Sometimes this takes place through developing formal institutions sufficient to unify disparate voices into a single amplified voice, as in the development of citizens’ groups in the case of Love Canal, or through the development of the Basel Convention. Such organizations and institutions provide a means of coordination sufficient to effect change, and the provision of voice sufficient to provide the recognition compromised by environmental injustice. To the extent we assist in these efforts, or provide for similar coordination and amplification of suppressed voices of vulnerable populations affected by climate change, the e-waste trade, and other environmental justice concerns, we have gone toward satisfying our prospective responsibilities for effecting changes in our institutional environment. We have a shared moral responsibility to develop the institutional changes necessary for responding to environmental injustice. As Young might have put it, we have a shared responsibility to take responsibility for the collective harms resulting from our institutions.
As institutions enable our collective response to harms, institutions provide the means by which we might discharge our responsibilities — individual, shared, or collective — for environmental justice. In this chapter we have seen that even in those cases where institutions capable of addressing environmental injustice do not yet exist, but reasonably could be generated, we have a shared responsibility to generate those entities capable of providing a collective response, whether as agents or merely as coordinating institutions.
Through a focus on institutional reform, we are more able to focus on the conditions that generate that injustice, and thereby on the victims of injustice. Not only does this put the right focus on matters of environmental justice, it also makes apparent the moral responsibilities we have to make those changes we are able to make, to influence our collectives and take ownership of our collective responsibilities. The problem of environmental justice is not merely political or social or economic. It is moral.Notes
1 But see List and Pettit, 2011, p. 156, and Neuhauser, 2014, for worries that the forward and backward looking distinction may be a bit misleading.
2 For an excellent summary, see Smiley, 2017.
3 We can see the seeds of one version of this account in List and Pettit (2011). This is anticipated by the programming account of mental causation in Jackson and Pettit (1990).
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