Climate Change and the Politics of Responsibility

Abstract

This article theorizes the politics of responsibility—activist struggles over who will be held accountable for structural injustices like the “catastrophic” changes underway in our climate. To do so, it develops a politicized conception of responsibility, one that treats responsibility as a social construct and a terrain of contestation. Building on the work of feminist philosophers of responsibility and on the praxis of “kayaktivism,” this politicized account treats responsibility as a social practice of interrogating and contesting shared ethico-political judgments. On this understanding, taking responsibility or stepping up is a way of making responsibility—literally of (re)constructing those social practices and judgments through conscious efforts to persuade others, challenge prevailing norms and interpretations, change people’s beliefs about how the world works, revise popular expectations of social actors and institutions, and disrupt business as usual. The article highlights the centrality of norms and power to social practices of responsibility and suggests alternative perspectives on familiar philosophical worries about blame, complexity and agency, and justification.

Wages for Earthwork

“…Nevertheless, these structural accounts of the climate crisis remain marginal in the mainstream political theory/philosophy literature on "environmental ethics" and in more institutions-focused applied work on global justice. Such literatures still center on highly individualized or ideal-theoretic notions of moral responsibility and agency, which treat deep historical structures shaping contemporary global power relations as ancillary to core philosophical questions (Goodhart 2023).…”