It's springtime, which means that Princeton University Press is having its annual 50% off spring sale. From May 4th through June 9th, you can get 50% off nearly every single print, e-book, and audiobook from Princeton University Press. Just go to press.prinston.edu to get 50% off incredible books like Disneyland and the Rise of Automation. And beyond belief, how evidence shows what really works.
There are so many fantastic books you can get an incredible deal on. Go to press.prinston.edu and use the code spring50. That's sp-r-i-n-g-50 at press.prinston.edu. This day only lasts for a month, so go and get some books.
Hello, thank you for joining us. We are proud to welcome you to our special series, Survival by Degrees, brought to you by Brill, where we talk about the climate crisis and what tackling it really entails. I'm your host, Lee Jungrico. Today we're speaking with Anna Luiza LePoldt.
She has her PhD in Applied Ethics from Crührer University at Bocum. Her book is Climate Change and Individual Moral Duvies, a plea for the promotion of a collective solution. And, Eliza, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me today.
So to open up with a question that you ask in your book, what should individuals do to supplement the global fight against climate change? Well, you're starting with the smallest question first. I'll try to give some background information first before I try to give you an answer properly. I assume that the two of us and also many of the listeners have a very common intuition that we should all do a little bit to the global fight against climate change and reduce our personal carbon footprint by refraining from certain individual actions, such as flying or eating dairies or meat.
So this is typically the normative advice that is given to us as individual agents. But looking into the philosophical debate of the past 15 years, it's not that clear that changing our individual behavior is our primary moral duty. So when I started my research back in 2016, like five years ago, I wondered why philosophy has such a hard time providing straightforward argumentations while we as individuals and citizens have such a clear moral intuition. So I told myself when I started my research to actually accept that challenge and to provide a straightforward argumentation.
But as often in academia, my research actually led me to a different conclusion than the one that I was expecting. Because one of the key theoretical problems that I've come across is that climate change is actually a collective problem and not an individual problem. So a collective problem that is caused by innumerable day-to-day actions of almost 8 billion people. So none of these individual actions are in itself sufficient or necessary to either cause climate change or to stop climate change on the other hand.
So what we actually need is not individual action, but collective action and collective action in all sectors. So instead of arguing for a moral duty to refrain from certain actions, I argue in my book for an individual duty to promote collective action in all sectors. So my book is basically a challenge to our communication and still I don't leave individuals off the hook when it comes to climate responsibility and climate duties. So on the contrary, I actually ask of all of us a lot more than we assume to have right now.
And if I'm Ailey, I'm not sure if I've still got time for that, but I would really love to share a thought experiment with you because I feel it makes it a lot clearer. I would love to hear that. And that thought experiment is actually by Elizabeth Cripps. So I'm not taking credits for things I haven't developed.
But I feel that this thought experiment is making things a lot clearer. So her Cripps basic assumption is that obviously climate change is very serious and that climate induced harm is very serious. On the one hand, but that on the other hand, there are 8 billion people and all of those people contribute to climate change in numerable day-to-day actions. So her thought experiment goes in the following way.
Imagine a lake and in the middle of that lake, there is a person swimming and that person is fine. She's living, she's alive, she's fine. Suddenly, there is a group of people and these people don't know each other one by one. They are all there on an individual basis.
And all of them individually start to jump into the water and they start swimming and splashing. So first to go, but gradually, turbulence occurs in the water. So these turbulence get that intense after all, that the person in the middle of the lake starts drowning. But the point is that not the individual jumping into the water is enough to cause the person drowning, but the person is about to die.
But the individual action is not enough to actually drown the person. So now imagine further that you and I are among those people who cause turbulence and you notice the drowning person. So what can you do? You've got three options.
Actually, the first is you swim up to that person and pull her out of the water, save her life, and then you go back into the water yourself. This is what Cripps call a so-called direct duty. The second choice that you can make is actually leave the water and go home. That's the so-called mitigating duty.
So you would mitigate what all of us would actually have to do. And then there is a third option. You raise your, my awareness because I'm swimming next to you and we together raise awareness of all others jumping into the water. But we do not stop there, but we ask, for example, the municipality to position signs and we claim that there should be a lifeguard watching the lake, stuff like that.
So what we do is create collective action and collective action that actually has a sustainable effect. And that's what Cripps calls promotional duty. And I've picked up her terminology there and developed that further. So I want to dig into Cripps approach a little bit more, but as you were talking about this, it actually made me think that this approach to climate change is very similar to how we should have approached, or I guess we should still approach COVID.
When you were doing your research or after you were done with it, did you find any similarities between our individual actions and the collective action that we should take with climate change and then the individual action, collective action that needs to be taken against COVID? Well, I totally agree that there are obviously similarities, but I often get this question with regards to global poverty. If this argument can actually be translated to global poverty, and I don't believe that we should do this in the first place. We should, what I try to do is provide a straightforward argumentation for climate change.
And I believe that this has been a huge task. So before answering with either regard to global poverty or COVID, I wouldn't want to give a straight answer to that, but more or less with any collective action problem that is not solved on the collective level, we as individual agents can't assume that we don't have a moral responsibility or a moral duty to act, but we have the duty to actually push collective action. Yes. So getting back to Cripps, then I had another question about these three week collectivities that she talks about.
Can you just tell us what are the three week collectivities who have a moral duty to act on climate change and then what are those duties exactly? Yeah, sure. Well, Cripps theory, as I already said, is the basis of my book and much of what I said in the beginning are the views that I share with her or views that I supplemented in the course of my book. So two of her central findings are that collective action is required and that we need an effective solution.
And the second finding is that there is no collectivity that is actually prepared to perform sufficient collective action. And as a way out, she makes a case for so-called week collectivities that are basically collectivities that would have a moral duty to act collectively, if they were performed in a way that constitutes them as a collectivity already. According to Cripps, and that here I come to your question, according to Cripps, there are three week collectivities. It's for her, it's the polluters.
So all people who emit carbon above a morally relevant threshold. The second week collectivity is the able, all people who are actually able and to in her sense, mainly financially able to do something about climate change. And the third collectivity is the young, so all young generations around the world. So as none of these week collectivities is actually able to fulfill their duty as a collectivity yet.
The duty falls basically back to the individual level as a promotion of duty to promote that collective action that would actually be needed. And what I did in my book is that I interlinked her theory with a rights-based approach of Alan Gueherth and developed her theory a lot further. So for example, I argue that the able are not only the financially able, but all those people who have any ability to do something about climate change. And to me that also involves academics of all disciplines to actually focus their energy on providing profoundly new ways of thinking and acting that go way beyond those ways that we have today.
And also the second example is that I've also made a very strong case for young parents as members of the young to live up to their parental duty to raise their children within, or with a sense of climate awareness. And also next to that, to those theoretical questions, I claim that I will provide practical advice in my book. So one of the issues where I did that is in providing more orientation with regard to political questions, the need to be made on the way towards zero net zero emissions. Yeah.
So I want to talk a little bit more about the narrative surrounding climate change. I mean, you mentioned it's up to parents as well to teach their children the right thing to do here. Why do you think the narrative or the messaging that we're using about climate change right now is wrong? Yeah.
Well, I guess we need to differentiate between the narrative about climate change and the more a narrative about individual climate duties right but I guess the very short answer to both of them is that they both failed to enhance the effect that we require to tackle climate change effectively. But maybe to provide you a slightly longer answer it's the scientific consensus about climate change has never been clearer than today. It's very clear that the problem is that researchers mostly limit themselves to actually presenting facts about climate change. And though I as a philosopher and I find this very sympathetic and I love rationality and I love logic sorry so I'm very sympathetic to that and at the end of the day facts are of utmost importance and they are the only thing that matters.
But the problem with facts is that they only really work once they are embedded into more narratives that work. That's a point that David Fenton, a climate communication specialist actually brought up. So when it comes to the narrative about individual moral duties with regard to climate change, we as individuals and citizens are actually told that we all refrain from common sense of actions right that's what I said in the beginning. So typical suggestions that we probably receive as are they are mostly stimulated by some catchy slogan of the style like going green is easy ever but counts plan to treat it for free stuff like that I'm sure we all know them.
So this is what I call the dominant moral narrative of individual moral duties and the result is highly problematic in many many ways. One of these ways is maybe the following like we had in Germany, we had a very rainy summer. So many of us of my friends and relatives as well we ended up flying for a holiday and once we arrived at our travel destinations we stick to a very strict vegan diet or we refuse plastic bags or a separated way very accurately stuff like that so we try to behave in a way that is beneficial to the climate. And most of us probably flew home with the very unpleasant feeling that flying for a holiday has not been very beneficial to the climate but since every little bit counts that is the moral narrative that is established, we have basically every reason to assume that we are doing the correct thing.
But the truth is neither way separation nor vegan diet on itself nor paperbacks will stop climate change. What we actually need is a fundamentally new way to for example produce energy while guaranteeing energy security to the public. We need fundamentally new ways to mobility while ensuring that people in goods can still move around the planet or at least in their countries. We need fundamentally new fundamentally new diet while being able to feed the planet stuff like that so the key problem with the narrative and that's why I believe it's we're using the wrong moral narrative is first of all the theoretical part there is a substantial perspective from my philosophical perspective that there is a straightforward normative argument for that.
But even for people who don't agree with me that there is this straightforward normative argument, they should see that there is a second point and that's the following the following point is this moral narrative actually talks us into thinking that fighting climate change is a very private matter where we personally on a very individual basis can decide what we are willing to give up. And so we have a lot of us will probably give up flying another one will give up eating meat another one will give up drinking cows milk stuff like that. But in fact, climate climate action is not a private matter at all. It's a it's a very public one.
It needs our all of our collective action. And sort of like when you were talking about what you were doing on holiday it's like you were trying to practice a personal cap and trade approach versus the actual structural changes that we need that you mentioned to combat climate change. And so I believe that many of us end up to you know this is I personally I barely fly anymore I don't eat meat meat in like almost 14 years 15 years. Mostly live on a vegan diet so I practice all of these things myself but I believe that many people as this more a narrative exists in that way and end up flying for a holiday and then restructuring their behavior in their in their travel destinations and then they fly home and then they have done something in the global fight against climate change and that's not how it works we need those structural changes that are backed up by the society.
So I think that leads in perfectly to my last question which is outside of your academic work and curious how have you stepped out of your own comfort zone and turned your individual climate action into a public matter. Let's go on. Well, I mean I've defined promotion action as getting involved into the global fight against climate change and also pushing the political as well as the societal boundaries of climate action of the collective climate action in specific. And I have also in my book I've made it a very strong case for researchers of all disciplines to actually focus all of their energy on providing new ways of thinking and acting and to go away that go away beyond those ways that we have today.
So as a researcher I spent more than then four years challenging the status quo and providing a theory plus practical advice of which I hope that people will acknowledge it and get a feeling of hope and confidence to actually finally be able to make a meaningful difference. And then after my research, I worked sometime as a political advisor on sustainability issues and most recently I started working in research management. And as part of that I have the honor to work with a highly ambitious group of researchers and I'll try to push them to their boundaries and beyond. But in the follow up of my thesis and my book where I truly got into into a public matter is that whenever I get the chance to actually talk about my book or get involved into discussions I do so, and maybe speaking about more of stepping a comfort zone or stepping out of my comfort zone.
And so I personally incorporated this duty like dealing with these kinds of questions I kind of incorporated that into my personality this is simply what I believe is my duty so I do it. It's not to me it's not not like stepping out of my comfort zone this is simply what I believe I should do, but stepping out of my comfort zone like speaking about first like this has been at first when it comes to podcasts so basically today has been quite a bit of my comfort zone. And so happy to have the chance to discuss your work. Thank you so much.
Anna Louise Leopold her book is climate change and individual moral duties, a plea for the promotion of a collective solution. You are listening to the Humanities Matter podcast you can find more podcast episodes on Apple podcast Spotify and Google podcast.