Title: (PDF) Individual Responsibility for Climate Change | Gianfranco Pellegrino - Academia.edu
Headings: Individual Responsibility for Climate Change
Individual Responsibility for Climate Change
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Individual Responsibility for Climate Change

Content: 1. Absence of individual responsibility for climate changes is often cited as a ground to explain the motivational difficulty of the morality of climate change. Here is a statement of this view: ' Because we tend not to see climate change as a moral problem, it does not motivate us to act with the urgency characteristic of our responses to moral challenges. '4 The kind of conduct needed to abate emissions and to mitigate future climate changes runs contrary to entrenched human motivations. The austere, self-denying and extremely cautious management of resources and lifestyles needed to abate current GHG emissions is easily perceived as strikingly severe and over-demanding. A common explanation of this perception appeals to the distance in time and space of the effects of our current consumption. We fail to fully appreciate the scope and the remote consequences of our behaviour. This  1  See Vanderheiden 2008: 160-1, 167-80.