URI: http://hdl.handle.net/1794/24554
Date: 2019-04-30
Abstract:
In this dissertation, I analyze climate change as a collective action problem. Decades of consistent policy and indeed institutional failure suggest that climate change cannot be managed top-down by experts and politicians alone. Climate communicators must therefore take up the challenge of ethically and politically motivating public action on this issue. Unfortunately, the ethical and political logic of climate response presents profound challenges to public motivation that appears to confound thinkers in the climate literature across disciplines. I thus endeavors to rethink the climate situation today from the perspective of collective motivation. Doing justice to the complexities of this multifaceted problematic demands interdisciplinary analysis, but the equally pressing need for general comprehension requires philosophical synthesis. For the climate issue is at once global and intergenerational in scale, and is systemic to modern social and cultural institutions that have long-evolved to structure the way people relate to each other, to nature, and ultimately to the world of everyday experience. My thesis, then, is that this collective action problem is ultimately an existential problem that calls for an existential response. Specifically, I argue that the ethical and political implications of climate response are largely received as an “existential threat” to the extent that they unsettle the integrity of everyday existence lived in common. That is, the deeper implications of this issue roundly contradict the background structures of “lifeworld identity” informing collective experience at some of the most general (socio-cultural) levels of being in the world. The consequences of this existential problem present us with two “quandaries” that must be addressed coherently. The “quandary of denial” signifies the largely ethical challenges of motivating a collective response to the historical and material realities of the climate ‘problem.’ The “quandary of transition,” by contrast, speaks to the relatively political challenges of relating the climate problem as such to climate ‘solutions’ that are collectively meaningful enough to positively inspire viable ways forward. Finally, I conclude by drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty to advance a critical phenomenology of public motivation responsive to these two moments of the existential problem.
