Going Green Makes You Mean … and Distracts You

When doing something is worse than doing nothing

According to a study reported in the Guardian, when people feel they have been morally virtuous by saving the planet through their purchases of organic baby food, for example, it leads to the "licensing [of] selfish and morally questionable behaviour", otherwise known as "moral balancing" or "compensatory ethics". The article came under the wonderful heading, “How going green may make you mean.”

How should an ethicist respond to yet another psychological study of human limitations? Some would no doubt argue that personal ethics should global, not local. Living ethically is a way of life, not an individual choice. That ethics should infuse all our choices, etc, etc

That is not my response. The “green movement” has another more significant adverse effect. It is a distraction. Governments and the public lead themselves to believe that they are actually addressing the environmental crisis by turning off lights, recycling and making people feel miserable for taking planes and driving cars. But they are doing little for the environment, while believing that they are saving it. This is a distraction from the real problem. The fate of the environment will now in large part be determined by China and the developing world. Our putting out the recycling will do nothing to change that. But while we feel good about ourselves, we fail to acknowledge the real problems and find solutions. Our ethics makes us feel good about ourselves and (falsely) reassures us that we are addressing the problem.

Toby Ord has identified the failure to give appropriate scale to the problems and solutions in development. He famously said that it matters more where you give, rather than whether you give because some programmes and charities are fabulously more cost-effective in orders of magnitude. The same applies to our efforts to improve the environment. Most of the things which we currently feel are so important will make little or no difference. And the biggest fish swim free.

We should not only identify ethical problems and find a solution. We should find the best solution. Too often doing something makes us feel good when we could and should do something else. In ethics, something is not always better than nothing.

Comments

[Kent]

But people are also powerless on a political level, and so it might be rational to do what one can, which on an individual level is very little.

I agree that strict and sweeping changes need to occur, but as is especially the case in China, it can only come from the uppermost layer of political agents.

[Stuart]

The problem here is that you are skirting round the edges of advocating that we all become free riders. Surely a more reasonable approach, both in terms of removing the compensatory problem and retaining individual responsibility for contributing to environmental recovery, is to attempt to direct society to a position where “green” behaviour is considered a norm, and is not even viewed as a matter for ethics. As Kent suggests, this is a matter for high level political agents to engineer.

[William]

I recently heard Clive Hamilton give a talk on his new book 'Requiem for a Species' - he said he often had to resist the urge to change his light-bulbs to more energy efficient ones, which he said made him feel a lot better about global warming (though in the scheme on things did very little). He also mentioned how, after the earthquake in Haiti, he couldn't bare watching the images of the wreck on the news. So, he called up and donated some money to an appeal, and then he felt much better about watching the images on TV (it seems that contributing in some way makes us feel like we have played our part and can then ignore it, even though we've not found a proper solution).