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Responsibility for Collective Inaction and the Knowledge Condition
Abstract
When confronted with especially complex ecological and social problems such as climate change, how are we to think about responsibility for collective inaction? Social and political philosophers have begun to consider the complexities of acting collectively with a view to creating more just and sustainable societies. Some have recently turned their attention to the question of whether more or less formally organized groups can ever be held morally responsible for not acting collectively, or else for not organizing themselves into groups capable of so doing. In this paper I argue that several questionable assumptions have shaped the character and scope of inquiry to this point, precluding us from grappling with a range of important questions concerning the epistemic dimensions of collective inaction. I offer an overview of recent conversation concerning collective inaction, advance a critique of the picture of responsibility that has emerged from this conversation, and propose an alternative approach to thinking about responsibility for collective inaction. I argue that sharing responsibility for participating in collective action often entails a further responsibility for engaging in collective inquiry, and a corresponding openness to reforming and transforming shared epistemic resources.
... It is naive to simply assert that plane travel should 'simply stop'-and we are specifically not advocating this per se. Given the power that institutions have to shift discourse and potentially behavior, however, there are opportunities to mobilize collective action on climate change [112] and change organisational expectations. ...
... Thus, a collective institutional response and action on academic plane travel could overset what is so often a normative discourse of 'right and wrong' and incentivise transformative individual pro-environmental behaviors by role modelling them at an institutional scale. As Doan [112] (p. 550) asserts: "Instead of acting as though an absence of clear solutions absolves us of responsibility for participating in collective action, loosely structured groups might take their shared 'not knowing' . . . ...
Universities are both disseminators and producers of the climate knowledge needed to institute the social and cultural change required for climate adaptation and mitigation to occur. They also have the opportunity to lead and model pro-environmental behavior, yet often have large carbon budgets, partly caused by staff travel. This paper explores this topic via an institutional case study of what factors motivate the academic community to undertake plane travel and the implications this has for wielding wider societal influence in terms of pro-environmental behavior. We report on a year-long qualitative social science study of academic plane travel at the University of Adelaide, South Australia where we investigated the tension between academic requirements to travel and the institution’s formal commitment to sustainability within the Campus Sustainability Plan. We found that, while many academics were worried about climate change, very few were willing to change their current practice and travel less because they are not institutionally incentivized to do so. There is a fear of not flying: plane travel is perceived as a key driver for career progression and this is an ongoing barrier to pro-environmental behavior. We conclude that institutional and political change will be required for individual change to occur and sustainable agendas to be met within academic communities.
... Invasions also assault the epistemic and the normative, how we think and what we believe (Simberloff 2012, Code 2013, Doan 2016. Scientific approaches have selectively overlooked the role of capitalist production-its mechanization, simplification, geographical re-ordering, and incessant spatiotemporal movement-as a causal factor in the production of invasive species. ...
... Models that explicitly connect disease dynamics to these political economies, as we have presented here, can contribute toward strategizing advances in public health prevention and farmer autonomy a growing literature indicates are necessary in scaling down infectious disease outbreaks of agricultural origins. Against the sovereign epistemic individualism at the core of a dated notion of natural science (Code 2013) and a related response skepticism opposed to collective action (Doan 2016), researchers need openly articulate and act on the accumulating evidence that successful public health and disease control broadly require the commons in land and community. The specifics in form and content represent a cutting-edge science of the 21st century. ...
In the context of modern civilization, the ecology of infectious disease cannot be described by interacting populations alone, as much of the modeling literature presumes. As a matter of first principle, formalisms and their statistical applications must account for the anthrosphere from which pathogens emerge. With that objective in mind, we first formally examine strategies for controlling outbreaks by way of environmental stochasticities human institutions help set. Using the Data Rate Theorem, we next explore disease control regimens under asymmetric conflicts between agribusiness interests rich in resources and State public health agencies and local communities constrained by those very resources. Military theory describes surprising successes in the face of such an imbalance, a result we apply here. Abduction points to strategies by which public health can defeat agribusinesses in its efforts to control agriculture-led pandemics, the heavy health and fiscal costs of which multinationals routinely pass off to the public.
In the context of modern civilization, the ecology of infectious disease cannot be described by interacting populations alone, as much of the modeling literature presumes. As a matter of first principle, formalisms and their statistical applications must account for the anthrosphere from which pathogens emerge. With that objective in mind, we first formally examine strategies for controlling outbreaks by way of environmental stochasticities human institutions help set. Using the Data Rate Theorem, we next explore disease control regimens under asymmetric conflicts between agribusiness interests rich in resources and State public health agencies and local communities constrained by those very resources. Military theory describes surprising successes in the face of such an imbalance, a result we apply here. Abduction points to strategies by which public health can defeat agribusinesses in its efforts to control agriculture-led pandemics, the heavy health, and fiscal costs of which multinationals routinely pass off to the public.KeywordsNeoliberal land usePandemicStochasticity
Humans are prone to producing morally suboptimal and even disastrous outcomes out of ignorance. Ignorance is generally thought to excuse agents from wrongdoing, but little attention has been paid to group-based ignorance as the reason for some of our collective failings. I distinguish between different types of first-order and higher order group-based ignorance and examine how these can variously lead to problematic inaction. I will make two suggestions regarding our epistemic obligations vis-a-vis collective (in)action problems: (1) that our epistemic obligations concern not just our own knowledge and beliefs but those of others, too and (2) that our epistemic obligations can be held collectively where the epistemic tasks cannot be performed by individuals acting in isolation, for example, when we are required to produce joint epistemic goods.
In 1970 Virginia Held wrote a paper in which she asked the reader to imagine a fictional scenario in which some strangers become bystanders to a murder whilst riding public transport. Held was interested in questions of moral responsibility – specifically, could the group of bystanders be morally responsible for its failure to act? This thesis uses Held’s example as a lens through which to ask a series of questions about moral responsibility and blame, in the hope that the answers to these questions can provide insight into our real-world duties to act with others. Given that many problems facing society can plausibly only be overcome by groups of people acting together, it is important that we have a good understanding of how we are morally required to behave collectively. After a short introduction to Held’s example and some clarificatory remarks, the first chapter of the thesis is dedicated to an enquiry into the nature of moral responsibility and blame. The second chapter examines Held’s proposal that we should hold the group qua group morally responsible for its failure to act. I argue that, whilst in other contexts it is appropriate to hold groups qua groups morally responsible for their acts, the bystanders in Held’s example do not constitute a kind of group which is capable of being morally responsible. We can therefore only ascribe moral responsibility to individuals in Held’s example. The third chapter asks how we can hold people morally responsible for failure to act when their action couldn’t have made a difference. The final chapter focuses on how my findings might apply to our real-world obligations.
Sally Haslanger has recently argued that philosophical focus on implicit bias is overly individualist, since social inequalities are best explained in terms of social structures rather than the actions and attitudes of individuals. I argue that questions of individual responsibility and implicit bias, properly understood, do constitute an important part of addressing structural injustice, and I propose an alternative conception of social structure according to which implicit biases are themselves best understood as a special type of structure.
Without doubt, the global challenges we are currently facing—above all world poverty and climate change —require collective solutions: states, national and international organizations, firms and business corporations as well as individuals must work together in order to remedy these problems. In this chapter, I discuss climate change mitigation as a collective action problem from the perspective of moral philosophy. In particular, I address and refute three arguments suggesting that business firms and corporations have no moral duty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions : (i) that business corporations are not appropriate addressees of moral demands because they are not moral agents , and (ii) that to the extent that they are moral agents their primary moral obligation is to their owners or shareholders, and (iii) the appeal to the difference principle: that individual business corporations cannot really make a significant difference to successful climate change mitigation.
Human actions have pushed planetary systems beyond their normal range of operation, bringing forth a new geological epoch of its own making. The Anthropocene —the age of humankind—is argued here to represent a failure of the higher education system (and business schools in particular) to prepare society for the challenges of transforming towards true social -ecological sustainability . In turn, it will be demonstrated that adherence to normative ‘mechanistic ’ modes of thought has prevented mainstream business education from effectively engaging with this task, and that a reorientation towards an organicist worldview is required. In doing so, the contours of business education are redefined to embrace holism, social-ecological complexity and ethical care for nature. Two organicist principles—social-ecological systems thinking and positive ecological reciprocity—are presented here as a starting point to imagine a business education fit for purpose in the twenty-first century.
Food justice is commonly understood as the norm that everyone should have access to safe, healthy and culturally-appropriate foods no matter one’s national origin, economic statuses, social identities, cultural membership, or disability. A second dimension of food justice, as commonly understood, is the norm that everyone who works within a food system, from restaurant servers to farm workers, should be paid livable and fair wages and work in safe conditions no matter one’s national origin, economic statuses, social identities, cultural membership, or disability. Another dimension of food justice, which is found in the words and writing of advocates but is perhaps less commonly appreciated, is that food justice should account for the value of food in relation to the self-determination of human groups such as urban communities of color, Indigenous peoples and migrant farmworkers, among many other groups. Reflecting on the claims of food justice advocates, my goal in this essay is to outline a norm of food justice that is based on the value of food in relation to the self-determination of human groups. In the essay, I begin by describing the first two dimensions of food justice; I then discuss the role of food in collective self-determination and introduce the idea of collective food relations, discussing in particular the role of manoomin (wild rice) in the collective self-determination of the Anishinaabek in the Great Lakes region; I then explain how disrupting collective food relations can be a form of food injustice; lastly, I discuss some specific further examples that illustrate these ideas.
Collectivities, just like individuals, exist, can act, bear responsibility for their acts and omissions, and be guilty. It sometimes makes sense to hold them responsible for what they do, or don't do, and to punish them for their misdeeds. With respect to many collectivities there is no practical purpose in holding them responsible, since there is not way that we can bring them to justice. But there are exceptions from this rule. In particular it is plausible to assume that sanctions against entire nations or peoples or populations living in open and democratic states may be an effective means to setting them straight where, collectively, they act wrongly. The best present example of this seems to be the Israelis.
The holding of doubts about climate change is often referred to as ‘scepticism’. However, there has been a lack of clarity in previous work as to what exactly this scepticism comprises. We integrate data obtained from discussion groups and a nationally representative survey, to interrogate and refine the concept of climate change scepticism with respect to the views of members of the public. We argue that two main types should be distinguished: epistemic scepticism, relating to doubts about the status of climate change as a scientific and physical phenomenon; and response scepticism, relating to doubts about the efficacy of action taken to address climate change. Whilst each type is independently associated by people themselves with climate change scepticism, we find that the latter is more strongly associated with a lack of concern about climate change. As such, additional effort should be directed towards addressing and engaging with people's doubts concerning attempts to address climate change.
Stirred by the contradiction between the mainstreamed castigation of merely symbolic eco-politics and the firm resolve of advanced consumer democracies to defend the core principles of democratic consumer capitalism, this contribution undertakes a meta-critique of the paradigm of symbolic politics. A tentative typology of different varieties of symbolic politics maps the terrain for a detailed analysis of symbolic politics in the popular understanding. A comprehensive cultural shift conceptualised as the post-ecologist turn is held responsible not only for a fundamental transformation of the ways in which late-modern societies frame and process their environmental problems, but also for the exhaustion of authentic eco-politics which, by implication, renders the critique of merely symbolic politics questionable. The concept of simulative politics is suggested as a more appropriate conceptualisation of late-modern eco-politics. Practices of simulative politics are presented as a key strategy which help late-modern societies to sustain what is known to be unsustainable.
Geographic studies of environmental racism have focused on the spatial relationships between environmental hazards and community demographics in order to determine if inequity exists. Conspicuously absent within this literature, however, is any substantive discussion of racism. This paper seeks to address this shortcoming in two ways. I first investigate how racism is understood and expressed in the literature. I argue that although racism is rarely explicitly discussed, a normative conceptualization of racism informs the research. Not only is this prevailing conception overly narrow and restrictive, it also denies the spatiality of racism. Consequently, my second goal is to demonstrate how various forms of racism contribute to environmental racism. In addition to conventional understandings of racism, I emphasize white privilege, a highly structural and spatial form of racism. Using Los Angeles as a case study, I examine how whites have secured relatively cleaner environments by moving away from older industrial cores via suburbanization. I suggest that the historical processes of suburbanization and decentralization are instances of white privilege and have contributed to contemporary patterns of environmental racism. Thus, in addition to interpreting racism as discriminatory facility siting and malicious intent, I also examine a less conscious but hegemonic form of racism, white privilege. Such an approach not only allows us to appreciate the range of racisms that shape the urban landscape, but also illuminates the functional relationships between places—in particular between industrial zones and residential suburbs, and how their development reflects and reproduces a particular racist formation.
Numerous theoretical frameworks have been developed to explain the gap between the possession of environmental knowledge and environmental awareness, and displaying pro-environmental behavior. Although many hundreds of studies have been undertaken, no definitive explanation has yet been found. Our article describes a few of the most influential and commonly used analytical frameworks: early US linear progression models; altruism, empathy and prosocial behavior models; and finally, sociological models. All of the models we discuss (and many of the ones we do not such as economic models, psychological models that look at behavior in general, social marketing models and that have become known as deliberative and inclusionary processes or procedures (DIPS)) have some validity in certain circumstances. This indicates that the question of what shapes pro-environmental behavior is such a complex one that it cannot be visualized through one single framework or diagram. We then analyze the factors that have been found to have some influence, positive or negative, on pro-environmental behavior such as demographic factors, external factors (e.g. institutional, economic, social and cultural) and internal factors (e.g. motivation, pro-environmental knowledge, awareness, values, attitudes, emotion, locus of control, responsibilities and priorities). Although we point out that developing a model that tries to incorporate all factors might neither be feasible nor useful, we feel that it can help illuminate this complex field. Accordingly, we propose our own model based on the work of Fliegenschnee and Schelakovsky (1998) who were influenced by Fietkau and Kessel (1981).
Offering a wide variety of philosophical approaches to the neglected philosophical problem of ignorance, this groundbreaking collection builds on Charles Mills's claim that racism involves an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance. Contributors explore how different forms of ignorance linked to race are produced and sustained and what role they play in promoting racism and white privilege. They argue that the ignorance that underpins racism is not a simple gap in knowledge, the accidental result of an epistemological oversight. In the case of racial oppression, ignorance often is actively produced for purposes of domination and exploitation. But as these essays demonstrate, ignorance is not simply a tool of oppression wielded by the powerful. It can also be a strategy for survival, an important tool for people of color to wield against white privilege and white supremacy. The book concludes that understanding ignorance and the politics of such ignorance should be a key element of epistemological and social/political analyses, for it has the potential to reveal the role of power in the construction of what is known and provide a lens for the political values at work in knowledge practices.
This book explores the epistemic side of oppression, focusing on racial and sexual oppression and their interconnections. It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences prevent members of different groups from interacting epistemically in fruitful ways-from listening to each other, learning from each other, and mutually enriching each other's perspectives. Medina's epistemology of resistance offers a contextualist theory of our complicity with epistemic injustices and a social connection model of shared responsibility for improving epistemic conditions of participation in social practices. Through the articulation of a new interactionism and polyphonic contextualism, the book develops a sustained argument about the role of the imagination in mediating social perceptions and interactions. It concludes that only through the cultivation of practices of resistance can we develop a social imagination that can help us become sensitive to the suffering of excluded and stigmatized subjects. Drawing on Feminist Standpoint Theory and Critical Race Theory, this book makes contributions to social epistemology and to recent discussions of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, epistemic responsibility, counter-performativity, and solidarity in the fight against racism and sexism.
Justice is one of the oldest and most central themes of philosophy, but sometimes we would do well to focus instead on injustice. In epistemology, the very idea that there is a first-order ethical dimension to our epistemic practices - the idea that there is such a thing as epistemic justice - remains obscure until we adjust the philosophical lens so that we see through to the negative space that is epistemic injustice. This book argues that there is a distinctively epistemic genus of injustice, in which someone is wronged specifically in their capacity as a knower, wronged therefore in a capacity essential to human value. The book identifies two forms of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. In doing so, it charts the ethical dimension of two fundamental epistemic practices: gaining knowledge by being told and making sense of our social experiences. As the account unfolds, the book travels through a range of philosophical problems. Thus, the book finds an analysis of social power; an account of prejudicial stereotypes; a characterization of two hybrid intellectual-ethical virtues; a revised account of the State of Nature used in genealogical explanations of the concept of knowledge; a discussion of objectification and 'silencing'; and a framework for a virtue epistemological account of testimony. The book reveals epistemic injustice as a potent yet largely silent dimension of discrimination, analyses the wrong it perpetrates, and constructs two hybrid ethical-intellectual virtues of epistemic justice which aim to forestall it.
Arguing that ecological thinking can animate an epistemology capable of addressing feminist, multicultural, and other post-colonial concerns, this book critiques the instrumental rationality, hyperbolized autonomy, abstract individualism, and exploitation of people and places that western epistemologies of mastery have legitimated. It proposes a politics of epistemic location, sensitive to the interplay of particularity and diversity, and focused on responsible epistemic practices. Starting from an epistemological approach implicit in Rachel Carson's scientific projects, the book draws, constructively and critically, on ecological theory and practice, on (post-Quinean) naturalized epistemology, and on feminist and post-colonial theory. Analyzing extended examples from developmental psychology, from medicine and law, and from circumstances where vulnerability, credibility, and public trust are at issue, the argument addresses the constitutive part played by an instituted social imaginary in shaping and regulating human lives. The practices and examples discussed invoke the responsibility requirements central to this text's larger purpose of imagining, crafting, articulating a creative, innovative, instituting social imaginary, committed to interrogating entrenched hierarchical social structures, en route to enacting principles of ideal cohabitation.
Genocide, global warming, organizational negligence, and oppressive social practices are four examples of moral contexts in which the interplay between individuals and collectives complicate how we are to understand moral responsibility. This book is a philosophical investigation of the complex moral landscape we find in collective situations such as these. The book argues that an accurate understanding of moral responsibility in collective contexts requires attention to responsibility at the individual and collective levels. Part One establishes the normative significance of collective responsibility. The book argues that collective responsibility is indispensible to providing a morally adequate account of collective actions such as genocide, and that without it even individual responsibility in genocide would not make sense. It explains the concepts of collective intention and collective intentional action, provides accounts of collective moral responsibility and collective guilt, and defends collective responsibility against objections, including the objection that collective responsibility holds some responsible for the actions of others. Part Two focuses on individual responsibility in collective contexts. The book claims that individuals are not morally responsible for collective actions as such, but they can be responsible in collective actions for the parts they play. It argues that the concept of collective obligation can help to address large scale global challenges such as global warming, environmental degradation, and widespread poverty and malnutrition. Finally, the book discusses cases of widespread ignorance and participation in wrongful social practice, whether it constitutes an excuse, and how to effect social change in those conditions.
'Environmental skepticism' describes the viewpoint that major environmental problems are either unreal or unimportant. This is the first book to analyze the importance of the anti-environmental counter-movement in world politics and its meaning for democratic and accountable deliberation, as well as its importance as a mal-adaptive project that hinders the world's people to rise to the challenges of sustainability.
When the noted political philosopher Iris Marion Young died in 2006, her death was mourned as the passing of "one of the most important political philosophers of the past quarter-century" (Cass Sunstein) and as an important and innovative thinker working at the conjunction of a number of important topics: global justice; democracy and difference; continental political theory; ethics and international affairs; and gender, race and public policy. This book discusses our responsibilities to address "structural" injustices in which we among many are implicated (but for which we are not to blame), often by virtue of participating in a market, such as buying goods produced in sweatshops, or participating in booming housing markets that leave many homeless. The book argues that addressing these structural injustices requires a new model of responsibility, which it calls the "social connection" model. The book develops this idea by clarifying the nature of structural injustice; developing the notion of political responsibility for injustice and how it differs from older ideas of blame and guilt; and finally how we can then use this model to describe our responsibilities to others no matter who we are and where we live.
* Research contained in this paper was supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation. The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect those of the foundation.
Epistemic oppression refers to persistent epistemic exclusion that hinders one’s contribution to knowledge production. The tendency to shy away from using the term “epistemic oppression” may follow from an assumption that epistemic forms of oppression are generally reducible to social and political forms of oppression. While I agree that many exclusions that compromise one’s ability to contribute to the production of knowledge can be reducible to social and political forms of oppression, there still exists distinctly irreducible forms of epistemic oppression. In this paper, I claim that a major point of distinction between reducible and irreducible epistemic oppression is the major source of difficulty one faces in addressing each kind of oppression, i.e. epistemic power or features of epistemological systems. Distinguishing between reducible and irreducible forms of epistemic oppression can offer a better understanding of what is at stake in deploying the term and when such deployment is apt.
In this essay I present an overview of the problem of climate change, with attention to issues of interest to feminists, such as the differential responsibilities of nations and the disproportionate "vulnerabilities" of females, people of color, and the economically disadvantaged in rehtion to climate change. I agree with others that justice requires governments, corporations, and individuals to take full responsibility for histories of pollution, and for present and future greenhouse gas emissions. Nonetheless I worry that an overemphasis on household and personal · sphere fossil fuel emissions distracts from attention to higher-level corporate and governmental responsibilities for addressing the problem of climate change. I argue that more attention should be placed on the higher-level responsibilities of corporations and governments, and I discuss how individuals might more effectively take responsibility for addressing global climate change, especially when corporations and governments refuse to do so.
Indigenous peoples must adapt to current and coming climate-induced environmental changes like sea-level rise, glacier retreat, and shifts in the ranges of important species. For some indigenous peoples, such changes can disrupt the continuance of the systems of responsibilities that their communities rely on self-consciously for living lives closely connected to the earth. Within this domain of indigeneity, some indigenous women take seriously the responsibilities that they may perceive they have as members of their communities. For the indigenous women who have such outlooks, responsibilities that they assume in their communities expose them to harms stemming from climate change impacts and other environmental changes. Yet at the same time, their commitment to these responsibilities motivates them to take on leadership positions in efforts at climate change adaptation and mitigation. I show why, at least for some indigenous women, this is an important way of framing the climate change impacts that affect them. I then argue that there is an important implication in this conversation for how we understand the political responsibilities of nonindigenous parties for supporting distinctly indigenous efforts at climate change adaptation and mitigation.
I adopt a situated approach to the question of what would constitute responsible trust and/or distrust in climate change science, and I identify some of the major challenges for laypersons in their attempts to know well by placing their trust in climate change experts. I examine evidence that white males, as a group of relative privilege, are more likely to distrust the institutions of climate change science than are other demographic groups, and use this example to consider specific challenges facing those who occupy positions of privilege and who seek to place their epistemic trust wisely. I argue that the insights of feminist standpoint theory and epistemologies of ignorance concerning the role of positionality in knowledge production and the need for critical reflexivity can be applied to cases of epistemic trust as well; in some contexts, such as climate change science, considerations of how those differently situated from oneself place their trust will be valuable contributions to responsible assignments of trust.
Neglect of the moral promise of disorientation is a persistent gap in even the most sophisticated philosophies of embodiment. In this article, I begin to correct this neglect by expanding our sense of the range and nature of disoriented experience and proposing new visions of disorientation as benefiting moral agency. Disorientations are experienced through complex interactions of corporeal, affective, and cognitive processes, and are characterized by feelings of shock, surprise, unease, and discomfort; felt disorientations almost always make us unsure of how to go on. I argue that experiences of disorientation can strengthen the moral agency of individuals. I begin by clarifying experiences of felt ease and orientation. I then characterize disoriented embodiment by investigating select experiences that often involve or accompany disorientation, focusing throughout on how disorientation prompts changes in motivation and action. I conclude by charting how disoriented embodiments can help individuals become better moral agents overall, in part by challenging norms that restrict embodiment and undermining dualistic conceptions of the self.
In this paper I engage interdisciplinary conversation on inaction as the dominant response to climate change, and develop an analysis of the specific phenomenon of complacency through a critical-feminist lens. I suggest that Chris Cuomo's discussion of the “insufficiency” problem and Susan Sherwin's call for a “public ethics” jointly point toward particularly promising harm-reduction strategies. I draw upon and extend their work by arguing that extant philosophical accounts of complacency are inadequate to the task of sorting out what it means to be complacent on climate change. I offer a sketch for an alternative account, which I take to be a start in the direction of mapping out a diverse array of “motivational vices” that need to be named, grappled with, and (hopefully) remedied.
Sometimes it seems intuitively plausible to hold loosely structured sets of individuals morally responsible for failing to act collectively. Virginia Held, Larry May, and Torbjörn Tännsjö have all drawn this conclusion from thought experiments concerning small groups, although they apply the conclusion to large-scale omissions as well. On the other hand it is commonly assumed that (collective) agency is a necessary condition for (collective) responsibility. If that is true, then how can we hold sets of people responsible for not having acted collectively? This paper argues that that loosely structured inactive groups sometimes meet this requirement if we employ a weak (but nonetheless non-reductionist) notion of collective agency. This notion can be defended on independent grounds. The resulting position on distribution of responsibility is more restrictive than Held's, May's or Tännsjö's, and this consequence seems intuitively attractive.
Talk of global warming is nearly inescapable these days -- but there are some who believe the concept of climate change is an elaborate hoax. Despite the input of the world's leading climate scientists, the urgings of politicians, and the outcry of many grassroots activists, many Americans continue to ignore the warning signs of severe climate shifts. How did this happen? Climate Cover-up seeks to answer this question, describing the pollsters and public faces who have crafted careful language to refute the findings of environmental scientists. Exploring the PR techniques, phony "think tanks," and funding used to pervert scientific fact, this book serves as a wake-up call to those who still wish to deny the inconvenient truth.
This paper is concerned with debates over the implementation of sustainability objectives. In particular, it focuses on policies that address the ‘value‐action gap’ in environmental policy. Using evidence from the author's research connected with the UK Going for Green Sustainable Communities Project in Huntingdonshire, the paper highlights the tensions between national policies that are based on an ‘information deficit’ model of participation, and local research and experience that posits a more complex relationship between individuals and institutions. While this suggests the need to develop more differentiated policies based on the restructuring of socioeconomic and political institutions, the paper warns against knee‐jerk calls for more local, community or public participation which simply replace one set of generalised appeals with another. The paper concludes that greater emphasis must be placed on the negotiation of partnerships that are more sensitive to local diversity, and which involve a more equitable distribution of responsibility between different environmental stakeholders.
The essay theorizes the responsibilities moral agents may be said to
have in relation to global structural social processes that have unjust
consequences. How ought moral agents, whether individual or institutional,
conceptualize their responsibilities in relation to global injustice? I
propose a model of responsibility from social connection as an
interpretation of obligations of justice arising from structural social
processes. I use the example of justice in transnational processes of
production, distribution and marketing of clothing to illustrate
operations of structural social processes that extend widely across
regions of the world.
Too often, identifying practices of silencing is a seemingly impossible exercise. Here I claim that attempting to give a conceptual reading of the epistemic violence present when silencing occurs can help distinguish the different ways members of oppressed groups are silenced with respect to testimony. I offer an account of epistemic violence as the failure, owing to pernicious ignorance, of hearers to meet the vulnerabilities of speakers in linguistic exchanges. Ultimately, I illustrate that by focusing on the ways in which hearers fail to meet speaker dependency in a linguistic exchange, efforts can be made to demarcate the different types of silencing people face when attempting to testify from oppressed positions in society.
Much philosophical discussion has been devoted to questions about what sort of existence to attribute to the objects1 of psychology. Recent focus on scientific realism as a way of answering ontological questions2 has subtly shifted the center of these questions. Thus, Descartes claimed to have demonstrated that psychological states were of (or in) a mind, a substance wholly different from the body. The question of causal interaction between the two arose, but he took his ultimate inability to answer it to indicate not the inadequacy of his dualism but the limits of metaphysical investigation. In contrast, for modern scientific realists what exists is whatever has to exist for our best theories to be true, and causality plays a central role in these accounts. Psychological states are whatever they have to be to have the (physical and psychological) causes and effects that they do.3
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