Sustainable Action: Perspectives for Individuals, Institutions, and Humanity

I investigate the motivation of human agents to take up the challenge of mitigating climate change. What makes it that people who are usually efficacious in otherwise morally and pragmatically complicated situations seem to be hampered in their motivation to follow through with taking sustainable action? I undertake my investigation by analysing three fundamentally different perspectives: the motivation of individuals to act sustainably, institutions who take responsibility for issuing policies that steer us towards taking sustainable action, and humanity, of which each individual member ought to understand her non-sustainable behaviour in relation to the continued existence of the collective of human beings.

My goal is to find out which hindrances agents experience when they take action on mitigating climate change, while having a perhaps very weak motive to do so. That is, choosing the agent’s first person perspective as the object of study renders my method phenomenological. The experiences of agents who take morally complicated actions are conveyed through case study material. I consult philosophical and empirical psychological theories in order to interpret the first-personal experiences that agents have when performing the morally complicated action in these case studies. Therefore, my method is conceptual in the sense that the analysis clarifies philosophical and psychological concepts by interpreting a real life human being’s agency in the case study. This leads me to name the method of this dissertation a conceptual-phenomenological analysis.

I apply the method of the conceptual-phenomenological analysis to real life case studies. The Rubicon model from empirical psychology describes individual agency as entailing three action phases: deliberation, commitment and execution. For these action phases, the motivational problems specific for sustainable action are investigated. This leads to a descriptive diagnosis of the problems with motivation for sustainable action. Based on the diagnosis, I reconstruct from the perspective of the individual agent which capabilities are required to overcome the motivational challenges. The perspective for the individual agent entails that she needs to acquire capabilities of practical reasoning and judgement, capabilities of social coordination and recognition, and capabilities of the will.

The institutional perspective should support agents acquiring the capabilities for taking sustainable action in constitutional democratic societies. First, I discuss informational strategies, which are based on environmental psychological research. Second, also structural institutional policies may be required that steer our behaviour towards sustainable behaviour, such as institutional policies that aim for nudging an agent’s behaviour towards more sustainable behaviour. Third, I propose an institutional policy that aims at enhancing the agential capabilities by means of the moral raising and education of the young generation.

Finally, if we don’t make a structural commitment to take sustainable action, then we suffer as humanity, and as individual and institutional agents, from severe moral failure. I argue for the thesis that human beings ought not to engage in morally corrupt behaviour on pain of suffering from living with a divided practical identity for which they are morally responsible. This leads me to claim that next to the weak motive, human beings have an indirect motive to make a commitment for taking sustainable action, and stay a unified moral agent, while remaining a candidate for a being person of moral integrity.