Climate Change and the Moral Agent: Individual Duties in an Interdependent World

Elizabeth Cripps’s book is the first detailed study of climate change from both individual and collective responsibility viewpoints. Although the book concentrates on climate ethics, the discussion on collectivities should be of interest to anyone working on social ontology, especially on collective responsibility for harm. Cripps herself mentions that her non-intentionalist account of collectivities, and the principle of moralized collective self-interest, could have other applications and widespread implications to moral duties we acquire either through mutual dependence, or as part of global collectives. The basis for collectivityhood for Cripps is in the cooperation (intentional or not) that follows (or should follow) from actual mutual dependency. She motivates her account with a critique of intentionalist models, which she finds too restrictive. Cripps’s question is where the duty to act on climate change could originate from. As she observes, traditional theories of moral accountability are ill-equipped to deal with collectively caused harms that cannot be traced back to collectively made decisions. This is why she sets out to find a way to define the subjects for responsibility, an extremely important and timely question. Cripps is right to criticize the dominant approach (which she labels as the intentionalist view) for failing to adequately grapple with large-scale collective action issues and problems. She offers her non-intentionalist model as an alternative that is able to accommodate a wider range of collectivities by appealing to actual interdependence through fundamental interests, or some common or shared goal that can only be achieved together. What makes the claim interesting is that the ascription of collectivityhood is not dependent on the individuals acknowledging their interdependence. In other words, Cripps’s model also allows for entirely non-intentional and unstructured collectivities where no member considers themselves a part of the group or jointly intends to do anything.