Dealing with climate change in a capitalist world
Why we should care about remote others in time and space when combating climate change protest.
In order to combat climate change, we need to cultivate a mindset driven by the need to care about remote others in time and space.
The moral world is concerned about climate change, the capitalist world less so. Much of the current discourse is about technological solutions, especially in energy production and distribution. Much less comfortable is the discourse about changing present behaviour in the event that our technological luck will run out—exercising the precautionary principle, the sacrificial trade-off over time for the sake of future people and their spaces who are unknown to us, and remote from us and our immediate moral attachments. Many observers like Anthony Giddens (The Politics of Climate Change, 2009) have pessimistically argued that distant threats are too unreal to trigger altruistic sacrifice, with the implication that a regulatory state is needed to enforce behavioural change. Is that possible through democracy reliant on popular voting, where immediate self-interested preferences prevail, whether individual or national? If, therefore, the appeal to altruism is weak, and a strong regulatory state unlikely, where are the human motives to be found to avoid self-destruction of our species?
This can be addressed through thinking about time preference behaviour, concentric circles of moral proximity, elements of well-being, and the problematic of free riding. These are all conceptual ingredients for sustainable development that are not unrealistically altruistic. Our time horizons are before and after us, stretched as a function of moral attachments. My grandfather was born in 1874. I was 30 and just a father when he died in 1975. My grandchildren might just be alive for the next century. That gives me a morally attached and thus meaningful time span of 226 years—Long enough to track significant changes affecting my cognitive bloodline. Everyone on the planet has a version of this story of intergenerational empathy. My grandfather was undoubtedly concerned for me in his future, as I am for my grandchildren.
In that way, we are time traders with a set of discount preferences which determine how we allocate behaviour between the present and future, determined by moral attachment that can be understood in terms of concentric circles of moral proximity. Our moral commitments to immediate and then wider kin are usually stronger and more comprehensive than to successively outer circles of friends, neighbours and broader identities (communities and nations). Moral attachments within these inner circles are more likely to be over longer periods of time, and thus vertical, not just horizontal, and contemporarily reciprocal. These conditions represent the intergenerational bargain within a vertical line of descendants acting with the interests of others in mind, bound to us by moral attachment. Not purely altruistic, in other words.
As we move to outer circles, attachments are likely to be less moral and comprehensive and more instrumental and specific. While it may be easier to understand intimate intergenerational bargains within inner concentric circles of moral attachments, the greater challenge is to understand such time preference bargains at the outer circles of instrumentality. In other words, why might we care for strangers in the present time but remote space? This is the arena of collective action between strangers and the underpinning for a longer-range institutionalised policy and strategic planning, which gives the concept of sustainability its meaning. Is a propensity for such collective action driven by well-being? Both objective and subjective senses of well-being represent the cognitive and social bases of sustaining behaviours. It is a feature of human and social existence that an individual's well-being is also a function of others' well-being—arranged through these concentric circles of moral proximity.
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