Climate Change and Individual Responsibility ─ Agency, Moral Disengagement and the Motivational Gap

If climate change represents a severe threat to humankind, why then is response to it characterized by inaction at all levels? The authors argue there are two complementary explanations for the lack of motivation. First, our moral judgment system appears to be unable to identify climate change as an important moral problem and there are pervasive doubts about the agency of individuals. This explanation, however, is incomplete: Individual emitters can effectively be held morally responsible for their luxury emissions. Second, doubts about individual agency have become overly emphasized and fail to convincingly exonerate individuals from responsibility. This book extends the second explanation for the motivational gap, namely that the arguments for the lack of individual agency do in fact correspond to mechanisms of moral disengagement. The use of these mechanisms enables consumption elites to maintain their consumptive lifestyles without having to accept moral responsibility for their luxury emissions.

Wouter Peeters is a researcher at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. His research focuses on the challenges to our conceptions of freedoms and responsibilities that are posed by climate change and environmental sustainability.

Andries De Smet is Junior Research Fellow of the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders at Ghent University. His research interests include cosmopolitanism and questions of responsibility regarding climate change and global justice.

Lisa Diependaele is a researcher at Ghent University, Belgium. She studies global ethics in international economic governance.

Sigrid Sterckx is Professor of Ethics and Political Philosophy at Ghent University, Belgium. Her current research focuses on: climate ethics and governance; medical decisions at the end of life; human tissue research; organ transplantation; neuroethics; and patent law. She has authored and co-authored more than 100 books, book chapters and journal articles on these topics and serves on various advisory boards and commissions, including the Belgian Advisory Committee on Bioethics.