Right Research

Abstract

Why should we try to reduce our destructive impacts on the environment, when it can seem that the effects of our individual acts are too small to make an ethically important difference? As Walter Sinnott-Armstrong puts the challenge, why, for instance, should one seek to reduce one’s emissions of greenhouse gases [GHGs] by cycling and taking public transit instead of driving, if it seems that ‘Climate change occur[s] on such a massive scale that my individual driving makes no difference to the welfare of anyone’?1 This is an instance of a general ethical problem about collective action, which is of great practical as well as theoretical importance. The view that our own reductions of GHG emissions will have too small of an effect to make an important difference appears to be the last line of defense of those inclined to oppose action to address climate change—if at any point they do tire of denying the overwhelming evidence that the climate is changing, that the change is anthropogenic, and that the change is extremely harmful.2 But even those who accept the overwhelming evidence for harmful anthropogenic climate change and agree that we should do something about it at the level of social policy can (like Sinnott-Armstrong) be sorely tempted—including as a rationalization for personal inaction—by the thought that individual attempts to act in less environmentally destructive ways are futile.