The Responsibility to Take Responsibility

It all came back to the concept of justice, for Love Canal families felt that they had been sacrificed on the altar of profit and power.... Activists wondered: Would the government be so apathetic about hazardous waste in an affluent area?.

(Newman, 2016, p. 172)

The harms that generate environmental injustice are commonly understood to be matters of collective responsibility. As Robyn Eckersley reminds us, “environmental protection is gener­ally accepted as a public good, and the task of preventing environmental degradation is widely understood as a collective responsibility” (2016, p. 346). But the nature of this collective respon­sibility is far from clear. The aim of this chapter is to provide some clarification.

One challenge to assigning collective responsibility for environmental injustice is that des­pite the long string of corporate malfeasance, governmental misconduct, and individual misdeed there is seldom a single agent, collective or otherwise, on whom to pin moral responsibility. This challenges our intuitive response to a harm or injustice: identify a culpable agent who caused that harm or injustice and assign blame accordingly. We can think of this typical approach as a backward directed approach to responsibility. But this focus on blameworthy actions that have already occurred may not always be the best way of addressing the harms of environmental injustice. In cases of environmental injustice we are responsible for more than just what we have done, directly. The scope of responsibility is broader. When our concerns are more with the background conditions that enable environmental injustice, we should also consider our for­ward directed responsibilities to change the social practices and institutions that constitute those background conditions, what we will here call our institutional environment (Wringe, 2014).

The chapter will proceed as follows. Section 34.2 will introduce environmental injustice and its relation to structural injustice. In section 34.3 the chapter will address what has else­where been called the programming account of collective responsibility (Shockley, 2007), according to which responsibility is warranted in cases where the (causal) role of a collective is ineliminable in characterizing the harm, wrong, or injustice. This provides a means of framing the connection between moral responsibility and collective responsibility more pro­ductively: we are responsible in a forward directed sense in those cases where addressing the moral wrong requires changing the institutional environment rather than (merely) assigning blame. In section 34.4 the chapter will outline the particularly significant role institutions and organizations play in providing the causal connection between individual actors and changes in the institutional environment. In section 34.5 the chapter will focus on the prospective shared responsibilities individuals have for addressing environmental justice. A brief conclusion will return us to the central theme of the chapter, that as individuals we have shared respon­sibilities for not only what we have done, but also what we have allowed and what we might have prevented. In cases where, together, we reasonably could have changed our institutional environment, we have a shared responsibility for not having done so. These shared responsi­bilities to make changes to our institutional environment provide the sense in which we are collectively responsible for environmental injustice.

34.2