Sustainable Action and Motivation

Pathways for Individuals, Institutions and Humanity

Roland Mees

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429576430
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

Sustainable Action and Motivation proposes individual competencies and institutional policies that can help overcome the motivational hurdles that hamper sustainable action.

Following the Paris Agreement of 2015 and the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the political momentum urgently to begin the drastic reduction of greenhouse gas emissions has increased significantly. Affluent, high-income OECD countries are expected to take the lead in the global transition to a low carbon society. Given this, we need a better understanding of the motivational problems that people in affluent countries face with acting sustainably. This book investigates the above questions by analysing three fundamentally different perspectives: individuals and their motivation to act sustainably; institutions who take responsibility for issuing policies that steer us towards taking sustainable action; and humanity, each individual member of which ought to understand his or her non-sustainable behaviour in relation to the continued existence of the collective of human beings.

Using theories from empirical psychology and a phenomenological approach to the research, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of practical philosophy, psychology of motivation and environmental psychology, as well as policymakers looking for ways to implement effective policies that encourage pro-environmental behaviour.

Part I

Problem, method, and case material

1 The problem with motivation for sustainable action

1.1 Sustainable action – “What’s in it for me?”

Within the range of our daily experiences, there are some that confront us with fundamental decisions about our life. These experiences do something to us; they transform us. They force us to change the view we happen to have on our lives. They make us aware of what we care about. And what we find out unexpectedly is that what we care about may differ from what others, who are significant to us, care about. Here is an example of such an experience.

A group of thirteen homeowners lives in a middle-class town somewhere in an affluent country. The material conditions of their prosperity are very similar. They all have a financial situation sufficiently above a certain threshold of wealth; they can afford to invest €5,000 in the installation on each of their homes of nine solar panels, without having to refrain from any other meaningful investment they might like to consider in order to continue with their lives above that threshold. All the homeowners have chosen to stay in their homes for the longer term. In their pragmatic view, it follows that they have to do something themselves to achieve a certain level of social cohesion, from which they will each benefit, and which is to the benefit of all. Overall, these are responsible, participating citizens in their part of town; their social relations can be characterised as safe, pleasant, and tolerant.

Suppose that this group of homeowners has gathered for a meeting about various topics of common concern and suppose that during this meeting someone raises the topic of climate change. They discuss the question as to whether they ought to install solar panels on their homes, since this would be a meaningful step towards their part of town becoming climate neutral in the long term. All homeowners agree that, from a moral point of view, they have a duty to install solar panels as a contribution to a reduction of the town’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Having agreed to this moral claim, S, who is one of the homeowners, calls for action by proposing that they accept an attractive offer from a reputable supplier to install nine solar panels on each house over the next couple of weeks. She explains that although each participant will need to make an upfront payment of roughly €5,000, the payback time is approximately eight years, which is well within the time period the homeowners have planned to stay in their homes. In fact, S’s proposal implies that the only thing the homeowners have to give up is the option to invest the required €5,000 in a different opportunity than the solar panels (a new TV set, say, or an extra holiday). However, deciding to buy the solar panels means reducing the balance in their savings accounts by €5,000 now in order to receive the same amount back over eight years through the decrease in their monthly energy bill. Living up to their obligation to contribute to sustainability collectively means that, as an individual, each homeowner has to execute the option to invest €5,000 in nine solar panels.

At first, the reaction to S’s proposal is simply silence. Nobody seems to know what to say, how to react. The facial expressions of the participants to the discussion change from lively and interested to austere and serious. After a long pause, during which S becomes increasingly overwhelmed by feelings of alienation and uncomfortableness, in a moment of sublimated confusion one of the other homeowners utters the words “What’s in it for me?”

At this point, there is some trivial interruption (coffee being served), which provides a convenient opportunity for everybody to drop the topic. After a while, all the homeowners have forgotten at least this part of the meeting, in part because future generations are mute and have no way of getting in touch to ask what is going to be done to respect their interests.

For S, however, this story is not yet over. One way or another, the way the other homeowners have treated her, and her proposal, has had an effect on her that she cannot easily overcome. After all, she wholeheartedly proposed accepting the offer for installation of the solar panels. She was confident that making the proposal to buy the solar panels, after having accepted that we ought to contribute to sustainable development, would be seen as entirely reasonable. S had to conclude, however, that the other homeowners did not share her conception of what was reasonable to do in this situation. The rejection of her initiative has had an emotional impact on her.

It is this experience of S, and the entire situation in which it was evoked, that will be reflected upon in this book. Obviously, S’s situation can be understood in many different ways. For example, I do not interpret her situation as simply a cognitive disagreement about, say, whether Minsk is the capital city of Belarus, with the other homeowners insisting that it is Ukraine. A more plausible interpretation could be that people have different conceptions of what it means to live up to a moral duty. They may draw different conclusions about the way moral obligations influence their course of action as individual agents. As a further interpretation, however, it seems to me that S experiences a kind of difference with other people that she has not experienced so far in other situations with the same people. This difference, as expressed by the words “What’s in it for me?”, brings to the fore the different motives of agents when they agree about the same moral requirement in a given situation. In this book, I will study the motives of individual agents for acting in ways that aim at promoting sustainability.

What does it do to S when other people do not conclude in the way she does that action is required in order to live up to the collectively accepted moral claim that we ought to reduce our carbon footprint? Conversely, what happens to us when we, despite agreeing that it is morally required of us to contribute to a reduction of climate change as a collective, remain sceptical about our contribution as an individual, which we express by saying “What’s in it for me?” What happens at the moment that S feels uncomfortable about the acceptance of her proposal to the way she understands herself as an acting human being? What is the effect on us if we, not just once but structurally, persist in a sceptical attitude towards our individual contribution to sustainable development expressible in the words “What’s in it for me?”

1.2 Understanding sustainability and sustainable action

In discussing the case of the homeowners above, I have tried to highlight some of the many, perhaps confusing, aspects of what it means to take action so as to promote a sustainable future for the planet. The question on which we focus is: Why is it so hard to take such an action? Given that we have problems in finding ways to, for example, mitigate climate change, we need to know more about the obstacles that keep us from engaging in this kind of action. Before we can investigate these obstacles, however, we need to be more specific about what is meant by “a sustainable future for the planet”. Once we have formulated a view on the sustainable future we want to strive for, we can be more specific about the sort of action that is needed to get us there.

We will, thus, start with choosing a position on how to understand the concept of sustainability. The concept of strong sustainability, as it has been developed recently as a successor to ‘sustainable development’, gives us a perspective on the future of the planet that seems sufficiently robust to provide normative guidance for human agents. It can also serve as a basis on which institutions can develop their policies. We will then formulate a concept of action that promotes strong sustainability. This is what we will call sustainable action.

Although the concept of sustainable development has a history that goes back to the eighteenth century, it entered widespread usage when the Brundtland Commission, also known as the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), issued its 1987 report, Our Common Future.¹ The report is most famous for the following definition:

Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts: The concept of ‘needs’, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs.

(WCED 1987, 43)

This definition was considered radical, on the one hand, as it established an explicit link between environmental and developmental issues. The report argued that ecological sustainability could not be achieved unless the problem of global poverty was successfully addressed. Both had to be resolved simultaneously and in a mutually reinforcing way. On the other hand, the definition included a reformist element in emphasising a strongly human-centred approach to development within ecological boundaries. This allowed, for example, for a political interpretation in terms of more, not less, human development (Robinson 2004, 372).

Nevertheless, sustainable development has been the subject of criticism. In his assessment of the critique, John Robinson (2004, 373–8) concludes that sustainable development has been interpreted mainly in an instrumental way, meaning that it has been used for other purposes not necessarily related to achieving sustainability. On the level of human values, sustainable development has not sufficiently steered towards greater alignment and unity of interpretation. The concept has been associated too much with technical solutions (“fixes”), instead of providing a normative picture of where the world should go, leading to socially acceptable policies to implement sustainable development.

Therefore, I follow Robinson’s proposal to choose the key concept of sustainability as the historical successor of sustainable development. I understand sustainability as a normative, integrative concept: it guides human action. Sustainability tells us what we have to do to live up to our duties, it does not tell us why we have to do this. I postpone a discussion of the reasons why we have duties to promote sustainability to §1.3. In line with the WCED report, sustainability summarises our moral duties to future generations. These duties are integrated with our duty to resolve global poverty. Moreover, sustainability imposes limits on human economic activity in order to preserve an amount of natural capital that must be kept constant (SRU 2002, 21).

In the literature a weak and a strong version of sustainability are being distinguished (SRU 2002; Ott and Döring 2008). The main feature of the concept of weak sustainability is that natural capital (the atmosphere, the ozone layer, the carbon cycle, fisheries, forests, rivers, flora, ecosystems, the sea, land, mineral resources, etc.) can be substituted by non-natural capital such as money or scientific knowledge. For example, it would be allowable under weak sustainability to destroy a forest in the expectation that this decrease in natural capital would lead to an increase in monetary or human capital from which future generations would benefit.

Strong sustainability, on the other hand, does not allow replacement of natural capital by manufactured capital; instead these forms of capital are considered complementary (Ott and Döring 2008, 146). This means that some natural capital stocks are incommensurable and non-substitutable, and must be maintained independently of the growth of other forms of capital. If one takes freedom of choice as a normative criterion, then strong sustainability creates more difficulties for current people to implement policies that promote sustainability, as it restricts their options for action. However, it leaves future people more options to make the choices they prefer than weak sustainability does (Ott and Döring 2008, 167). Human economic activity uses resources from nature, which it cannot always reproduce. Strong sustainability implies that human economic activity ought to remain within the boundaries set by nature and its capacity to reproduce what economic activity has withdrawn. The amount of natural capital that can be used for economic activity is understood as a theoretical quantity that cannot yet be determined empirically. The natural capital that can be extracted by economic activity depends on the objective of such activity, which could be justified on the basis of a theory of environmental ethics (see §1.3). The crux of the concept of strong sustainability, however, is the finite amount of natural capital that exists on earth, including the non-substitutability of its components by non-natural capital (SRU 2002, 64).

On the basis of the problems weak sustainability faces (SRU 2002, 59–64; Ott and Döring 2008, 127–36; Caney 2014) and the potential of strong sustainability to provide normative guidance to agents and institutions, I choose the strong version of sustainability over the weak version. I see strong sustainability as a normative concept that prescribes the duties of current people to future generations, which are integrated with duties to current generations in the sense of fighting global poverty, and the duty to preserve natural capital. There is obviously a lot to say about what sustainability means at the level of concrete human actions. As a minimum, I take it that “the combination of irreversibility and uncertainty should make us more cautious about depleting natural capital. … Some components of natural capital are unique, and their loss has uncertain and potentially irreversible effects on human wellbeing” (Atkinson et al. 1997, 16).

In order to provide a more concrete understanding that can be referred to throughout this book, we turn again to Konrad Ott and Ralph Döring, for whom sustainability means that current people must protect various forms of natural capital.² Moreover, current people are under the obligation to compensate for their usage of natural capital by an equivalent investment in the creation of natural capital (Ott and Döring 2008, 169). This leads me to adopt the following rules for sustainability at the level of individual agents and institutions:

Renewable resources ought to be used to the extent that they can regenerate themselves; non-renewable resources and fuels ought to be used to the extent that in parallel to their usage physically and functionally equivalent replacement by renewable resources is realised; polluting emissions must remain within the carrying capacity of the environment and ecosystems, and emissions of non-biodegradable pollutants ought to be minimised, irrespective of whether there is free carrying capacity available.

(SRU 2002, 67)

Through the above rules, sustainability imposes limits on human economic activity in order to preserve an amount of natural capital that forms a fair bequest package for future generations.

Before we can define what a sustainable action is, we need to say a few words about the general concept of action. For the sort of ethical purposes involved here, inadvertently moving one’s arm, for example, does not count as an action in the relevant sense. Action is not merely a piece of behaviour that happens to agents. Instead, the concept of action presupposes that the agent aims at a certain goal, and that she at least has the possibility of doing otherwise – that is, of refraining from doing the action, or of doing some other action (Düwell 2014, 35).

The agent voluntarily chooses to act as she does, without being forced by anything other than her own reasons for acting. But voluntariness is not enough: one can voluntarily do things without having a purpose. The sort of action that interests us is also intentional or purposive. The agent acts for some end or purpose that constitutes her reason for acting; this purpose may consist in the action itself or in something to be achieved by the action, which the agent has evaluated as good, and which therefore guides her behaviour (Kalis 2009, 51). We assume that the agent is capable of reflecting on the purposes for which she acts, even if she does not always do so. In performing an action, the agent is aware during the stages of acting that she does the action for the end she has c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I: Problem, method, and case material
• PART II: A conceptual-phenomenological analysis of the Rubicon action phases
• PART III: Pathways for individuals, institutions, and humanity
• Concluding reflections
• References
• Index