Climate Ethics and the Everyday Lifeworld

Abstract

Our everyday lifeworlds, the environments in which we spend our daily lives, in which we exercise agency and control and to which we are bound through practical knowledge and routines, receive little attention in contemporary climate ethics. This is unfortunate, as climate ethics can benefit from an in-depth analysis of the lifeworld-perspective—especially when it comes to evaluating the individual’s role in the face of climate change. This paper focuses on two key problems, the problem of individual climate responsibility and the problem of the individual’s motivation to support climate protection policies. Currently discussed strategies to solve both problems face serious objections. A lifeworld-oriented perspective, so I argue, helps us to better understand both problems as well as the reasons why they are practically resistant to solutions proposed in the philosophical literature. My main claim is that climate change’s serious consequences cannot be experienced in the current everyday lifeworlds of most people who live in the Western hemisphere. In consequence, appeals to conscience lack adequate grounding in everyday contexts. These contexts, however, have a decisive impact on the individual’s motivation and moral behavior. Based on this critique, I give some suggestions how the problems of individual responsibility and motivation could be handled from a lifeworld-oriented perspective.

1 Introduction

In this text, my main aim is to discuss the individual’s position in the face of climate change from a new perspective, the perspective of our everyday lifeworlds. In contemporary climate ethics, the individual, their role and their duties are discussed mainly in the context of two problems, the problem of individual responsibility and the problem of motivation (see sect. ‘Climate Ethics and the Individual’). Both discussions leave questions unanswered and face significant problems. My central claim is that these questions and problems are better understood if analyzed from an everyday lifeworld-perspective. To justify this claim, I will first develop the notion of an everyday lifeworld (sect. ‘The Everyday Lifeworld’). Then, I will present my main argument (sect. ‘The Climate Crisis in the (Western) Lifeworld’): in the Western hemisphere, climate crisis’ disastrous consequences do not yet have a noticeable impact on everyday lifeworlds. This will surely change in the future. By contrast, efficient climate protection policies do affect our everyday lifeworlds decisively here and now. This mismatch, so I argue, sheds new light on the problems of individual responsibility and motivation and partly explains the problems currently debated in the literature. In the following sections, I try to offer first and tentative solutions to the problems of responsibility (sect. ‘Addressing the Problem of Responsibility: The Importance of Local Climate Protection Projects’) and motivation (sect. ‘Addressing the Problem of Motivation: Aesthetic Experience’) that take the everyday lifeworld’s perspective as a starting point.

2 Climate Ethics and the Individual

In many important dimensions, climate ethics is an applied ethics that focusses on a collective, even a global level. There are good reasons for such an emphasis. After all, societal, national, and international politics are decisive when it comes to fighting climate crisis. Societies have to reduce their carbon emissions dramatically within the next years. States have to implement the Paris agreement and other international arrangements efficiently if the net zero goal should be reached in due course so that anthropogenic climate change can be stopped before critical tipping points in the climate system are reached.¹

How does the individual, as a person, a human agent, fit into this picture? Current debates in climate ethics regarding individuals focus mainly on two aspects, the problem of responsibility and the problem of motivation.

The problem of responsibility can be stated in this way: what kind of moral responsibility does the individual (in the Western world) bear in the face of climate crisis? There are three basic answers to this problem. The first is: none at all! In his influential article, It’s not my fault!, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong defended the claim that there exist no individual moral obligations to reduce one’s own greenhouse gas emissions.² He presents several arguments for this view. One central idea is that one single person simply cannot—neither alone nor indirectly, by giving a bad example and influencing other people’s behavior—possess any decisive influence on the climate system (2005: 300 f.). Following this, an individual could not be blamed for causing harm through emitting too much greenhouse gases. The causalities involved simply are too complex for grounding moral critique directed at individual behavior.

The second group of positions claims that individuals possess a duty to reduce their carbon emissions. One way to spell this out is to rely on the notion of individual contributions to expected harms caused through climate change that could be avoided and that, therefore, should be avoided (Hiller 2011: 352 f.). A second way is to rely on the idea of an individual’s budget or fair share of emissions (Baatz 2014, Baatz/Voget-Kleschin 2019). Such fair shares might vary in absolute terms, as, for example, different people might depend to different degrees on carbon-intensive infrastructure. Still another way to defend individual duties to reduce carbon emissions is to draw on a virtue-ethical conception: “We ought to do what we can to reduce our climate impacts, because we care about others—because we are just, compassionate, and benevolent people.” (Lenzi 2022: 8) In such a conception, there is no need to connect moral blame to assumptions about the causal effectiveness of one’s own carbon emissions: if we fail to reduce our emissions, we are blameworthy, as such failure reflects “vices of injustice, callousness, indifference” (ibid.).³

Finally, one can claim that individuals possess responsibility as citizens. They have obligations not to reduce their emissions in private life, but to get politically involved and to support policies that prevent climate change and aim at achieving the net zero goal. Interestingly, Sinnott-Armstrong’s just-mentioned article ends with the claim that “our real moral obligations […] are to get governments to do their job to prevent the disaster of excessive global warming” (2005: 312). Likewise, many prominent activists claim that the individual’s political contribution is far more important than private consumption decisions (see, e.g., Neubauer/Repenning 2019: 259 f.). In the recent ethical debate, Elizabeth Cripps has made a strong case for the primacy of “promotional duties”, duties to use one’s voice as a citizen to campaign for political change (Cripps 2013: e.g.: 133-143; for a detailed discussion see Lippold 2020: 43-65).

Those authors who claim that individuals have personal responsibilities to reduce their emissions or to act as citizens have to face the aforementioned problem that an individual person’s contribution to climate change seems to be negligible. This undoubtedly is a major challenge—which, of course, does not amount to claiming that it cannot be met.⁴ As well, an individual’s ability to reduce their carbon emissions or to participate in politics differ significantly, due to social position, age, gender, class, and many other criteria beyond the individual’s control. Theories of individual climate responsibility must take these social differences adequately into account.

Positions who defend an individual’s political responsibility to actively support climate protection policies face another challenge. Many theorists of democracy hold that citizens are free to abstain from politics. They are entitled to live the life of a “private citizen” or even a “perfect privatist” (Ackerman 1991: 232–235). Why should this freedom to abstain not also apply when it comes to climate policies? The size of the problem alone does not provide a convincing answer. After all, world hunger, unresolved wars and the dramatic extinction of species are problems of catastrophic dimensions as well, which are also partly the result of complex global structures. Therefore, postulating a political responsibility of individual citizens only for climate policy bears strong traits of an ad hoc solution. It seems more promising to use the climate crisis as an opportunity to fundamentally rethink individual political obligations. This, however, has hardly happened in climate ethics so far.

The second problem is the problem of motivation. It can be described like this: In polls, in surveys and in private conversations, in political discourse and in everyday small talk, most people seem to agree that the climate crisis is maybe the greatest challenge of our times, in any case one of the most pressing problems that needs full political and public attention. However, when it comes to action—voting, political campaigning, consuming etc.—, considerations concerning climate change prevention play only a minor role if they are of any importance at all. Obviously, there exists a lack of motivation to be guided in one’s own actions by climate-related reasons.⁵

Recent empirical research suggests that individual motivation to support climate action at least partly depends on the chosen climate policies’ specific characteristics and can, therefore, be strengthened through intelligent policy design. Thus, in a much-discussed cross-cultural survey, Dechezleprêtre et al. come to the conclusion that people in countries as different as, e.g., the U.S., Poland, Southern Africa, Germany, and China, articulate stronger support for a specific climate policy when they believe that it is effective and that it does not affect neither themselves nor those who are worst off in a negative way (2022: 34). Climate ethicists, of course, should take these and comparable empirical findings seriously when addressing the problem of motivation. At the same time, these surveys should be interpreted with caution, as they might be just another way to prove the problem’s existence: After all, these surveys do not tell us whether the participants will in fact be motivated sufficiently to support well-designed climate politics in real life.

It is, therefore, important that climate ethicists address the problem of motivation from a normative point of view. The well-known phrase: “Why should I do anything for posterity? What has posterity done for me?”⁶, indicates that one might easily become demotivated. What could motivate agents to care about those who are most severely affected by uncontrolled climate change, those living in the poorest area of the world today and those living on earth in the future? Several answers have been discussed. Let me briefly introduce three of them to give an impression of the field.⁷

First, one can rely on the notion of indirect reciprocity: Within a reciprocal system, everyone is motivated to act for the benefit of other members of the system because they can expect equivalent benefits in return. According to authors like Joseph Heath, we can understand systems, “in which benefits flow only one way” (2013: 33), as systems of indirect reciprocity: A gives something to B, which motivates (and creates obligations for) B to give something to C etc. The fact that we inherited an inhabitable planet from our parents should motivate us to fight climate change, so that we can pass an inhabitable earth to our children.

Second, John Passmore’s (1980: 88) concept of a chain of love rests on the idea that each generation should focus on caring for the very next generation, to which it is normally emotionally tied. Who would not be motivated by love for their children? If every generation focusses on the proximate generation, it seems to be possible to bridge the motivational gap through affection.

Third, many authors believe that institutional arrangements are the key solution to the problem of motivation. New institutions are to be introduced into the constitutional order of the democratic state whose main task is to defend climate and environmental interests. These institutions can be understood, for example, as advocates or representatives of future generations. There are various proposals for the concrete design of such institutions and their powers, for example, ombudspersons, courts of justice, or independently working parliamentary chambers.⁸ The basic idea is simple: Reliably operating institutions should close the motivational gap. Where the population lacks the will to actively act on climate protection, a constitutional institution with a corresponding mandate steps in.

In my view, these answers rather show how serious the problem is than being able to solve it convincingly. The concept of indirect reciprocity, even if it works,⁹ provides reasons to prevent climate change. It is too academic for having a decisive impact on an agent’s motivational structure. Passmore’s chain of love is “hopelessly unrealistic” (Birnbacher 2009: 288).¹⁰ Obviously, love for one’s own children and a lot of private investments in their future often go hand in hand with insufficient motivation to support climate protection activities. Finally, institutional improvements might be important in strengthening democracy’s ability to fight the climate crisis. Nevertheless, this presupposes that the citizenry is motivated to accept and continually support these institutions. It is not only recent experience with right-wing populist governments that has shown that institutional arrangements depend on lasting majority support if they are to work successfully (cf. Müller-Salo 2020: 72–76). And, of course, institutions do not solve the problem at the individual level when it comes to reshaping one’s own lifestyle as it is needed for climate protection.

Now, it is easy to see that the problem of responsibility and the problem of motivation are closely connected to each other: The involved causalities are too fuzzy, the individual’s impact—as an emitter, but maybe as well as a political agent—is too small. Besides that, the individual lacks basic alternatives in the way that they cannot simply leave the system and start a new life in zero net structures. The amount of their emissions is strongly determined by the surroundings they live in and they must rely on. Given these circumstances that complicate the attribution of individual responsibility, it is not surprising that the problem of motivation arises.

As this brief overview indicates, climate ethics faces some recalcitrant problems when dealing with the individual, their position and their obligations in confronting climate change. In my view, climate ethics has not sufficiently addressed the question how, in what ways, the problem of responsibility and the problem of motivation are encountered by individuals, how they are embedded in their everyday lives. The debate is focused on abstract categories like individual moral duties, virtues, and rights. The following reflections aim at illustrating that an everyday perspective sheds new light on both problems and on the individual’s role in facing the climate crisis.

3 The Everyday Lifeworld

The idea of a lifeworld is ambiguous and used very differently in various contexts. Therefore, some conceptual considerations are in order. In view of the subject matter at hand, I will highlight four aspects.

First, probably the most important analyses of the lifeworld-concept can be found in traditional phenomenology, especially in the work of Husserl. He puts forward two theses in relation to the lifeworld. On the one hand, the lifeworld is the starting point and foundation of every scientific engagement with the world (Husserl 1970: § 34 e), 129–132). There is no reason to discuss that claim in this paper and I explicitly do not adopt it here. On the other hand—and this is crucial—, the lifeworld is always already given as self-evident, “in the plain certainty of experience” (ibid.: §28, 105). Rhetorically, Husserl asks:

“Is not the life-world as such what we know best, what is always taken for granted in all human life, always familiar to us in its typology through experience? Are not all its horizons of the unknown simply horizons of what is just incompletely known, i.e., known in advance in respect of its most general typology? For prescientific life, of course, this type of acquaintance suffices, as does its manner of converting the unknown into the known, gaining ‘occasional’ knowledge on the basis of experience (verifying itself internally and thereby excluding illusion) and induction. This suffices for everyday praxis.” (ibid., § 34 a): 123 f.)

Second, the everyday lifeworld consists of those spaces, people, things, and structures with which we constantly come into contact.¹¹ Our attitude towards this everyday lifeworld is characterized by two things. On one side, practical knowledge—knowing how instead of propositional knowledge, knowing that (Ryle 1945)—is of utmost importance. In our everyday, we know how things work, how people behave, how to use structures effectively and, to mention a concrete example, how to traverse places (Kukla 2022: 4). In other words, our everyday lifeworld is deeply familiar to us (Haapala 2005). On the other side, our actions in everyday life are characterized by routines and fixed procedures, constantly repeating patterns. Everyday life is stabilized through fixed habits. It is “life on autopilot” (Saito 2007: 24) that can be led without permanent conscious decision-making (Naukkarinen 2013). Both aspects, the acquisition of practical knowledge and the development of routines and habits, are crucial for people to feel at home in concrete everyday environments, which in turn is often a decisive prerequisite for agency.¹²

Third, within the lifeworld, experience is often value-laden. The distinction between description and evaluation remains artificial. It is imposed from the (theoretical) outside perspective upon the lifeworld. There are two reasons for that. On the one hand, evaluation and description cannot be separated from each other precisely enough. Rather, both are “closely intertwined. […] The ‘directions of fit’ between subject and world are not to be neatly separated if evaluations are tied to precise description or descriptions are sensitive to demands and vulnerabilities. Both have cognitive aspects as well as evaluative or value-discovering ones.” (Siep 2022: 23; cf. Siep 2004: 32, 198, 218) On the other hand, we mostly experience our lifeworld as something that has certain characteristics and possesses certain values. We walk through the same street every morning and realize its properties—the built structures, the noises of the traffic, the condition of the front-gardens—as well as its values—the aesthetic value of observing the change of seasons in the streetscape, the unpleasant feeling of insecurity between two cross streets, the smell of exhaust fumes, a daily reminder of the high levels of air pollution, etc. Philosophical phenomenology surely has a point in this regard when it emphasizes the importance of the notion of Leib: Since human beings have a body with which they can not only perceive their environment, but at the same time experience it as painful or unpleasant, description and evaluation belong together in the human lifeworld.¹³

Finally, moral norms bear different relations to the lifeworld. Those norms that guide everyday human behavior are deeply embedded in the lifeworld, in which their relevance can be explored. People can observe in their everyday lives that agents are held accountable for transgressing these norms and, conversely, that compliance is appreciated and possibly rewarded. Perhaps more importantly, people can experience in the lifeworld why these norms matter.

The justification of moral norms remains dependent on the lifeworld as well. This also holds true for those norms that apply to special, for example technical, contexts. Therefore, many authors emphasize the lifeworld’s importance as the basis of a society’s ethical communication and moral discourse. In this context, the term “lifeworld” is usually used more broadly to denote the totality of shared cultural, social, and political ideas that can be referred to in moral debates. For example, Habermas writes that attempts to base social integration on the use of language oriented to mutual understanding would be far too risky “if communicative action were not embedded in lifeworld contexts that provide the backing of a massive background consensus” (Habermas 1996: 22).¹⁴

As should have become clear by now, the everyday lifeworld is a world we share with each other in important dimensions. Everyone’s lifeworld is influenced by their biography, their experiences, their practical knowledge, their routines. At the same time, an individual’s biography, their knowledge and their routines have been shaped by structures others confront as well: built structures, environmental features, cultural patterns, norms and traditions etc. These structures not only prevent solipsistic encapsulation. Without them, the idea of anchoring our moral discourses in an intersubjectively shared lifeworld would be inconceivable. Take the example of a vivid urban square: this place may play a very different role in many people’s everyday lives. It might be linked to different practices, experiences, memories, and bodies of knowledge. But these are nevertheless experiences of the same built structures; practices and bodies of knowledge relate to the same urban location. This is precisely why people can have a meaningful conversation about this particular component of their commonly shared everyday lifeworld and discuss, for example, how the square should be used in the future.

To sum up: The everyday lifeworld is the world already and always given to us in a mode of certainty. We possess practical knowledge about it and develop routines to navigate smoothly through it, to master it competently in our everyday life. In our lifeworld, description and evaluation go hand in hand. Important moral norms are firmly embedded into it. Our lifeworld is our shared horizon when we dispute moral issues.

4 The Climate Crisis in the (Western) Lifeworld

If the concept of the everyday lifeworld is interpreted as developed in the previous section and if we focus on the lives of the vast majority of Western citizens, the following holds true: the climate crisis does not yet affect our everyday lifeworlds in relevant ways.¹⁵ What might come as a surprise, is, in my view, a key insight to understand Western reluctance in taking effective measures in the fight against climate change.

Of course, the climate crisis is already leaving its visible marks on nature. Ecosystems are changing rapidly. Many native species find it increasingly difficult to adapt to climate change and are often displaced by invasive species that are better able to cope with the new climatic conditions. However, these consequences and signs of change do not yet affect the vast majority of Western people. We no longer work or live in daily contact with nature. At the moment, our high-tech agriculture is still able to deliver food reliably—and at reliable prices—and to maintain the belief in a far-reaching independence from our natural environments. There are many comparable stories to tell. Where climate change is already visible today in our natural environments, Western societies are set up in ways that most of us do not perceive its harmful consequences.

If activists claim: “We experience the consequences of climate change every day!”, we need to ask some uncomfortable counter-questions: When was the last time climate change stopped us from performing any of our daily activities and routines? When did climate change prevent us from eating the way we want to eat? When was the last time our mode of transport was changed due to the earth’s heating up?

In answering these questions, one might point to the many disasters and catastrophes that also hit the Western hemisphere in the last years. Just take the massive wildfires in the U.S. and Canada, the severe drought in big parts of Southern Europe or the flood in Germany in July 2021. Considering these events, can anyone seriously deny that Western societies are already facing the effects of climate change? Of course not. Thanks to the great progress recent attribution science has made, we can understand climate change’s influence on single instances of extreme weather events better and better.¹⁶ At this point, however, we must distinguish between the climate crisis’ impact on Western societies and its impact on everyday lifeworlds. My thesis is that these catastrophes don’t have an impact on the latter. The reason for that is quite simple: horrible catastrophes are not interpreted within the categories and frameworks of the everyday lifeworld. With all their disruptive force, they are perceived as the everyday’s violent interruption. They are interpreted as an exterior, abrupt threat that endangers the lifeworld, its habits and routines as a whole—as it endangers human life itself—, not as a sneaking intruder that is about to change central aspects of the world deeply familiar to us.

In other words, if Western citizens experience climate change, such experience is in most cases not grounded in their everyday lifeworld, but rather a catastrophic experience of their lifeworld’s fragility, maybe even its collapse. Therefore, the theses that Western societies already face severe effects of climate change and that, nevertheless, contemporary Western citizens’ everyday lifeworlds are not affected by the climate crisis in relevant and noticeable ways, do not contradict each other.

Certain consequences of climate change, such as long periods of heat and drought, will become a part of the everyday lifeworld in many Western societies in the future. However, in the Western present with its technical possibilities—from air conditioning to a still functioning water supply—and its interpretative resources—that allow us to talk about weather instead of talking about the climate system—, we are still able to ignore these consequences in lifeworld contexts. There is no question that this will change very soon unless a resolute climate protection policy is implemented. But this is where we stand.

The story has a second part. If we want to fight the climate crisis efficiently, if we want to reach the net zero goal, we need to fundamentally restructure our everyday lifeworlds—the way we eat, the way we dwell, the way we travel and commute etc. Climate change challenges our everyday life as “life on autopilot”, it forces us to rethink our habits. Therefore, the fight against climate change in a sense endangers our lifeworld, the world familiar to us, structured through practical knowledge and well-established routines. We have to re-learn a lot of things, adaptation has to happen on the small-scale of everyday practices.

In one of the very rare papers that rely on the concept of “lifeworld” in climate ethics, Tim Christion Myers argues that climate change is an existential threat in the phenomenological sense as it endangers the intersubjective structures of existence. This threat, Myers goes on, fosters anxieties that can lead to climate change denial. In consequence, we should interpret “climate denial as an anxious attempt to work with others in order to keep the ethical significance of climate change at a safe remove” (2014: 55). Myers’ argument draws on ethnographic work undertaken by sociologist Kari Marie Norgaard, who differentiates between different forms of climate change denial. Following Stanley Cohen (2001: 8 f.), she emphasizes the importance of “implicatory denial”: “What I observed […] is not in most cases a rejection of information per se, but the failure to integrate this knowledge into everyday life or to transform it into social action.” (Norgaard 2011: 11)

If my analysis is correct, Norgaard’s findings should be interpreted differently. People don’t have to work anxiously together to keep climate change’s threat out of their everyday lives, as Myers suggests. Rather, people have no reason to engage with the climate crisis at all as it doesn’t have any significant impact upon their everyday lifeworlds. Seen from the lifeworld’s perspective, climate change still is a merely theoretical problem. To use Norgaard’s wording again: there is no need to integrate one’s—theoretical!—knowledge of climate change into everyday life, unless one is not confronted with climate change in everyday life.

At the very latest, it now becomes obvious why climate ethics needs to include a lifeworld-perspective to deal with persistent problems of responsibility and motivation. Western citizens don’t experience the effects of climate change in their everyday lifeworlds yet. Given this circumstance, it is not surprising that they lack motivation to fundamentally reorganize their everyday. Such reorganization, however, is mandatory to prevent climate change from becoming disastrous.

Things don’t get better when it comes to the issue of individual responsibility. The underlying moral problem is a complicated, abstract problem that has to be addressed on as different levels as the global, the national and the local level. The relevant causal mechanisms are diffuse, a person’s contribution to the problem is at the same time marginal and at least partly beyond their possibilities of influence. This all hinders a strong anchoring of climate protection norms in the everyday lifeworld. Furthermore, people often lack lifeworld-related experiences of control and success when it comes to climate-related moral norms. As noticed before, control and success are important features of norms embedded into the lifeworld: I can experience why a norm is important—and I can experience that those people who violate a norm will be held accountable. This seems not to be true with regard to climate-related moral norms: A person can change their behavior radically in order to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions without experiencing any particular positive and rewarding effect, like a significant contribution in reducing their country’s emissions. Rather, they might experience that the problem is far beyond their control and their possibilities of influence. Why, they might ask themselves, should I turn my lifeworld upside down if I cannot change anything at all? If the lifeworld-perspective is taken seriously, it is far too easy to dismiss such a reaction as ignorant or, even worse, as morally blameworthy.

The problems of responsibility and motivation appear in new light when viewed against the background of our everyday lifeworld. Climate ethics, therefore, faces the task of finding solutions to both problems that adequately reflect the perspective of (Western) everyday life—and thus the familiar perspective of those whose actions matter decisively if we are to reach the net zero goal. Some tentative steps towards such solutions will be suggested in the following sections.

5 Addressing the Problem of Responsibility: The Importance of Local Climate Protection Projects

As became clear before, a firm grounding of individual climate responsibility in lifeworld contexts is regularly impeded for several reasons. The problem’s complex causal structure far exceeds our everyday radius of action. One easily runs danger of experiencing one’s own actions as meaningless. This holds true for individual attempts to reduce carbon emissions as well as for political actions that aim at supporting effective climate protection policies. Finally, those moral principles crucial for climate ethics transcend our everyday life. Their importance cannot be perceived in the lifeworld, one can be a successful agent in lifeworld surroundings regardless of whether one chooses a strategy of compliancy or non-compliancy.

If individual climate responsibility should be firmly grounded in the lifeworld and its networks of norms, practices, and knowledge, these problems must be addressed. To do this, one should begin with defining a plausible goal: Lifeworld-grounded climate protection needs goals that are grounded in the lifeworld as well. The net zero goal and the 1.5-degree target aren’t such goals. By contrast, generating 80% of one’s own village’s electricity from renewable energy, re-greening the city center so that it will be a little cooler in coming heat waves, or expanding the suburban railway network to reduce car traffic: such goals are located within our everyday lifeworld. We perceive the involved structures—and their problems—on our daily way to work. We know (or can learn from experts, but in a very concrete fashion) what needs to be done to reach the goal. Maybe most importantly, we know when the work is done, when the target is achieved. Within this picture, individual climate responsibility can be defined as a responsibility to support—at least, a responsibility not to impede or aggravate—climate protection projects and policies developed in one’s own neighborhoods and municipalities, in those environments that constitute one’s own everyday lifeworld.

In the second section of this paper, I briefly introduced the two most prominent conceptions of individual climate responsibility in current climate ethics: being politically responsible as a citizen and being individually responsible to reduce one’s own greenhouse gas emissions. Now, one could claim that the definition I’ve just proposed is nothing more than a specification of the first idea, a specification of an individual’s political duty to support effective measures against climate change. One might even claim that the proposal can be brought into harmony with the second idea. After all, if I want to reduce my own greenhouse gas emissions, I might have good reasons to support changes in my everyday environments that help me to reduce my dependency on carbon-intensive structures.

However, I believe that such interpretations would miss the central idea underlying the presented argument: The individual responsibility to support climate protection projects and policies in one’s own everyday environments is not a secondary responsibility, derived from some broader account of individual climate responsibility. Rather, the claim is: this is all we have. Only an individual responsibility to support local climate protection policies can be firmly embedded in our everyday lifeworlds. We can perceive whether people are successful in living up to their responsibilities; we can find paths to reach the envisaged, concrete goals and act correspondingly.

This is not the place to develop a detailed account of responsibility. However, it should be noted that, unlike direct moral duties, responsibility often rests upon contexts and ascriptions. Whether one is responsible or not, is often not a foregone conclusion, but a matter of social agreement (Bayertz 1995: 20 f.): one is made responsible. If persons should contribute individually to humanity’s fight against the climate crisis, they should be made responsible in ways that can be integrated into their everyday lifeworlds. Where such integration fails, individuals cannot be expected to fulfil the responsibility attributed to them as they cannot see why they are hold responsible.

To avoid any misunderstandings: without doubt, it is praiseworthy and probably virtuous if individuals try to reduce their carbon emissions—although one should not forget that issues of social status and habitus are of crucial importance here. Furthermore, it is certainly true that significant political mobilization and protests throughout Western societies are a prerequisite for political reforms and efficient state-run actions that are urgently needed to prevent disastrous consequences of climate change. Nevertheless, acknowledging all this does, for the aforementioned reasons, not equate to postulating individual responsibilities to do such things. Rather, it is a matter of determining the right place of individual responsibility and not prematurely releasing institutional actors out of their obligations. In any case, the attribution of individual responsibility will only succeed in practice where this responsibility can be grounded in the everyday lifeworld, its structures, its networks of norms that allow for control and success.

The proposal outlined here adequately takes into account the climate crisis’ complex structure. A global governance with its institutions, treatises and its corresponding moral principles as discussed in climate ethics is needed. Individual persons have no influence upon this level, consequently, they cannot be held accountable. At the same time, and based on such a global policy framework, climate action is needed everywhere. Each city, each municipality has to develop strategies, design projects to contribute its fair share to the global fight against climate change. At this point, the individuals enter the stage. They are everyday experts when it comes to their own cities, suburbs, neighborhoods. They can make a difference, and can, therefore, be held responsible.

Let me briefly highlight five aspects that might enhance our understanding of individual climate responsibility connected to local climate protection measures and projects and, therefore, grounded in our everyday lifeworlds.

First, such projects typically pursue several goals at the same time. This is central to their being anchored in our lifeworlds. An expansion of public transport serves to reduce emissions and at the same time to improve air quality, the quality of living in a certain area via the reduction of traffic jams etc. Sponge city concepts aim at improvements in urban flood management. At the same time, they seek to foster a city’s resilience in the face of prolonged periods of heat and a reduction in biodiversity. These place-related goals that are simultaneously pursued with local climate protection measures might point to a solution to the problem of motivation: while citizens might not sufficiently be motivated to fight against an abstract climate crisis, to protect a future that is yet to come from serious harm, they might be prepared to support policies that have a foreseeable positive impact on their everyday environments.

Second, to further ground these policies in our lifeworlds, participation is crucial. Participation might take very different forms, reaching from participatory planning to social and economic participation, like, e.g., wind parks that are owned by municipal companies or citizens’ co-operatives. As it is well known, responsibility is more likely to be exercised where it is accompanied by opportunities to shape things, where citizens are literally responsible, can exert influence, can change things, and where they are not merely the addressees of abstract obligations.¹⁷

Third, in the context of such projects, it is much easier to hold individuals morally accountable. This possibility of accountability, as seen, is what matters in the lifeworld. The question: ‘why aren’t you doing anything about climate change?’ quickly comes to nothing, and in the worst case ends in unproductive accusations. By contrast, the question: ‘why are you against building a wind engine on the fields behind the Northern Station?’, is a question that allows for a serious debate based on a commonly shared everyday lifeworld. In such a debate, a person can be criticized with good, lifeworld-based reasons if they not only disagree with the construction of a wind turbine, but actively campaign against it. In such cases, it is possible to determine exactly what individual responsibility might consist of and to argue about who does or does not live up to it.

Fourth, maybe even an individual responsibility to reduce one’s own emissions can be adequately grounded within such local projects. One could think of a municipal initiative that aims at reducing the emissions of all citizens by a certain percentage within a certain period of time. Various projects and support measures can be adopted to promote the achievement of this goal. Within such a framework, individual emission reduction makes sense from a lifeworld perspective. Now, the individual’s efforts can make a real difference: will the local target be missed or not? Attitudes of refusal become debatable: why don’t you participate in our municipal initiative?

Finally, narratives that connect specific projects to specific everyday environments and lifeworlds might play an important role in citizens’ preparedness to accept their responsibility and to act accordingly. To mention one specific example that I consider a very powerful one: Minden-Lübbecke, a district (Kreis) located in the northeast of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, presents itself fur cultural, touristic, and marketing purposes as the ‘Mühlenkreis’ (‘mill district’). In the district, many historic mills, especially windmills, still exist. They have been reconstructed and can be visited. A tourist cycle route has been built that connects more than 40 mills.

In recent years, several wind engines have been built in the district, accompanied by local protests. In 2021, a Lutheran vicar presented an interesting small narrative in the parish newsletter of a village in the district that I happened to read by chance. In the editorial, he asks his parishioners to view the wind engines as a modern, contemporary continuation of the windmills that have shaped the landscape ever since and have been crucial for the district’s historic identity and cultural self-image. The wind engines, he writes, provide something that is as important as the daily bread that has been delivered for centuries with the windmills’ help: daily, constantly available electricity.¹⁸

This image seems so powerful to me because it tells the addressees what a specific climate protection measure has to do with them and their local identity. It embeds a necessary innovation deeply into the traditions of a specific everyday lifeworld. In my view, it is an important task of environmental humanities to contribute to the discovery and development of such narratives everywhere.

Taking the lifeworld perspective seriously results in critically questioning established notions of individual climate responsibility. However, as the preceding considerations have illustrated, the idea of an everyday lifeworld can also become the starting point for a constructive proposal on how individual responsibility should be understood when facing the climate crisis.

6 Addressing the Problem of Motivation: Aesthetic Experience

Aesthetic arguments have been important for a long time in justifying efforts to protect and conserve landscapes and ecosystems. Aesthetic considerations played an important role in the history of national park movements (Saito 1998: 138 f.). Some authors believe that aesthetic arguments, despite all possible criticism of being subjective and mere utterances of personal taste, are the best arguments we have for protecting our natural environments (Meyer 2003: 92–129; Krebs et al. 2021). They look for connections between our ideas of the beautiful, the good, and the ecological (e.g. Böhme 1989: 71–75; Seel 1996: 220–236; Carlson 2000: 72–101).¹⁹

Aesthetic experience—understood as an experience of how exactly an entity is sensually perceivable, in which ways its perceivable qualities are ‘given to the senses’ (Seel 1991: 35; Schmücker 2014: 56)²⁰—is inextricably linked to the individual that has such an experience. This link is a coin with two sides. On the one hand, it might impede objective aesthetic knowledge, it might fuel doubts concerning the possibility of justifiable aesthetic value judgments. On the other hand, it explains aesthetics’ motivational forces. Aesthetic experiences are experiences of all senses, they go hand in hand with imagination and cognition, with memory and emotions. Therefore, a walk in the forest, with all its sounds and smells, the play of the light between the treetops, might remind us of our childhood, it might evoke feelings of pleasure and awe. In any case, this aesthetic experience might motivate us more to support the local forest preservation campaign than any theoretical engagement with arguments concerning the ecologic importance of forests could do.

I believe it worthwhile to reflect on how aesthetics’ motivational potentials can be used in addressing the aforementioned problem of motivation that climate ethics needs to face. The basic idea is this: our everyday lifeworld can be experienced aesthetically. We often don’t do this. Such an experience, therefore, shifts our focus of attention. Nevertheless, the experience we have continues to be an experience of our everyday lifeworld, the world familiar to us. Some of these aesthetic experiences of our everyday lifeworld will be extremely negative. Again, this negative impression is, first of all, an aesthetic impression. However, given some plausible connections between the aesthetic and the good, such aesthetic impressions can have an indicative function: if I cannot experience an important part of my everyday lifeworld aesthetically positive, I should take this as a warning, as a hint that something goes wrong morally as well. Furthermore, this negative aesthetic experience can motivate me up to a certain degree to contribute to changes in my everyday lifeworld. I get an interest to avoid similar experiences in the future, I start to think about my habits and routines.

Now, my claim is that the parts of our everyday lifeworld, whose aesthetic experience would be very negative, are those very same parts that must change dramatically to reach the net zero goal. This is why the proposed aesthetic approach can be used in addressing the motivation problem in climate ethics.

Let us look at one example in full detail. Think of a big street in a city that connects the center with some suburbs. It has not been designed as a special arterial road, a road with limited access built in distance to existing physical structures. Rather, there are houses built on both sides. People are living there, although people avoid living there as the amount of traffic grows every year. The pavements are all parked up, it is hard to get a free spot to park. Traffic is always heavy, with long traffic jams forming at rush hour in the morning and afternoon. For many people, such a street is a—rather annoying—part of their everyday lifeworld. Normally, they experience this street every day, sitting in their cars and being stuck in a traffic jam.

Now, imagine such a group of daily drivers who meets at a hot summer’s day. This time, they are not sitting in their cars, but they meet for a walk on the street’s pavement, during the afternoon rush hour. They aren’t up to anything special. They just want to experience the street aesthetically. The experience can be described as an uncommon experience of the common: They are engaging with their everyday lifeworld in an extraordinary way. The experience they are going to have is close enough to their everyday lifeworld to have an impact upon it. Unlike a climate change-induced catastrophe, it is not disruptive to their lifeworld.

Probably, this group of drivers won’t have a very good time walking along the street. In the afternoon hours the heat becomes unbearable, especially since it is combined with all the car exhausts that hang in the air. The street is full of traffic noise. The drivers believe they can feel the aggressions of those who are stuck in the jam when these hit the gas and brake sharply again shortly afterwards. They sweat and feel thirsty. They might even feel insecure in realizing that their bodies can easily be hurt or killed if one of the drivers is inattentive for some seconds.

The overall aesthetic experience this group of people has is clearly negative. Furthermore, the connections between the aesthetic and the good, aesthetics’ aforementioned indicative function, cannot be overlooked in this example. In walking down the street, the drivers experience aesthetically that living here would make them sick, that such conditions are incompatible with good human lives. Why should we accept loads of places in our cities whose negative characteristics are impossible to overlook if we only engage with them aesthetically for once?

Such an aesthetic experience undoubtedly offers potential for motivation. This is mainly because aesthetic experiences leave lasting impressions. When the drivers are back in their cars, driving on the street and getting stuck in the traffic jam, they will remember their negative experience. The problem has thus been anchored—albeit aesthetically at first—in their everyday lifeworld. Urban mobility must change fundamentally if the climate protection goals are to be achieved. Aesthetic experiences of those multi-faceted problems connected to private transport in urban areas can motivate people to support this fundamental change as it allows them to perceive the problem as a problem of their lifeworld and the structural transformation as an actual improvement of their everyday.

But what about the rich petrol head who loves their cars more than anything and who would always opt for more motor ways and against speed limits? They might be wealthy enough to work from home or to go by private helicopter so that the daily traffic jam is no important part of their lifeworld. However, they love to drive fast on that street on Sundays in one of their expensive limousines when there is little traffic. Therefore, they are strictly against any attempt to replan this street, to introduce speed limits and to reduce traffic.

If such a person could be motivated to have a stroll in this street during rush hour, their aesthetic experience would be as negative as the drivers’ experience in the example I have just presented. As the petrol head has a body that possesses similar characteristics and capacities, they could not ignore the bad smell, the heat, the feelings of stress. The central difference is that they probably would not care in the long run. As the traffic jam has nothing to do with their everyday life, the walk would probably not unfold any motivational force. This, however, is not a serious problem. Because, first, I did not claim that aesthetic experiences is a key to solve all motivational problems concerning climate change. Second, issues of motivation and reasonable discussion must be separated, although they are interwoven. The drivers who take the walk might get motivated to support some plans to reorganize the street, to reduce traffic, to limit speed. They do not necessary acquire additional reasons to support these plans, as these reasons are already well known: climate protection, health promotion, quality of dwelling, air purity etc. The petrol head has no reasons of a comparable argumentative strength to offer to defend their preferred way of using the public street.

As the petrol head’s example shows, the lifeworld-perspective developed in this paper enables us to do two things. First, we can identify different perspectives on and everyday interactions within those environments that we share with each other. The wealthy petrol head, the street’s dwellers and the drivers stuck in the jam share the same lifeworld structures, although their everydays differ significantly. The petrol head might complain that their personal lifeworld will worsen when the road is traffic-calmed. From their individual perspective, such a judgment is comprehensible. From the viewpoint of the other stakeholders, a new traffic regulation seems like a significant improvement, which is perfectly understandably as well. Second, the approach tells us how such conflicts between different perspectives on a commonly shared lifeworld have to be dealt with. They need to be solved through moral discourses—and subsequent regulations—that are grounded in the very same shared lifeworld of norms, principles, reasons, and values.

Aesthetic experiences can unfold motivational power in various sectors that are central to climate protection. To briefly mention a second example, just think of industrial agriculture and especially factory farming. For very good reasons, Western societies have never succeeded in establishing an aesthetically positive relationship to factory farming. The moral abuses are too obvious for that. Aesthetically, society has remained stuck in the idyll of the early modern farm, as it can still be found in nearly every book for children. Modern animal husbandry takes place out of the public eye.²¹ It is inconceivable otherwise. Thus, a rural walk past a modern pig farm can be aesthetically memorable, with high fences, the large tanks containing the slurry, the game of imagination: how many animals might be behind these walls? The impression that remains won’t be a good one. Anyone who has once become aesthetically involved with such a factory-style pig farm will come to the conclusion: This is not what our agricultural landscape should look like.

Aesthetic experiences alone won’t solve the problem of motivation. Moreover, aesthetics is often part of the problem, for example, when it promotes a culture of waste or endorses forms of design and garden architecture that are not sustainable at all. Therefore, only one, rather modest point is at issue here: certain aesthetic experiences open up enriching perspectives on our everyday lifeworlds and can, therefore, contribute to a solution of the problem of motivation. They shed new light on central aspects of our lifeworlds that must be reshaped in the interest of climate protection. When it comes to other parts of our everyday, like the insulation of buildings and the way energy is generated, aesthetic experiences might be of lesser importance, although everyday aesthetics teaches us to never underestimate the power of the aesthetic. More importantly, perhaps, the focus on aesthetic experiences raises a new problem of motivation: how can people be motivated to engage aesthetically with their lifeworld as described above? How are people encouraged to perceive their everyday environments from a new perspective? This is no easy task. Aesthetic education at all levels, from kindergartens to adult education centers, comes into play. Cities might kick off campaigns, they might offer guided tours with experts that make it easier for people to aesthetically discover their everyday lifeworld in formerly unknown ways. Will such campaigns be successful? Perhaps. Will aesthetic experiences motivate people to support climate protection policies? Perhaps, at least to a certain degree. There might be reasons to remain skeptical. On the other hand, there might be better reasons for testing this out in practice. After all, traditional strategies to motivate people to support climate protection policies—giving evidence, pointing to the risks, naming the facts, formulating simple goals—have had decades to be proven empirically unsuccessful. It’s high time to test out something new.

7 Conclusion

This paper’s conclusion can only be a tentative one: Without doubt, much more needs to be said to defend in full detail the lifeworld-based solutions to the problems of responsibility and motivation that I sketched in the two previous sections. For example, the question should be explored to what extent the everyday confrontation with climate fictions in literature, film, and popular culture can contribute to solve the problem of motivation.²² Above all, one fundamental point should not be overlooked: our everyday lifeworlds are closely interwoven with our fossil ways of life. Therefore, they are always in danger of becoming starting points of resistance against the dramatic changes of all societal structures that are necessary if the climate crisis is to be kept in check.

However, this should not prevent us from finally giving the perspective of the everyday lifeworld the attention it deserves in contexts of climate ethics.²³ For appeals to individual responsibility and complaints about the lack of individual motivation will remain fruitless as long as they cannot be meaningfully integrated into the dense moral network of everyday life.²⁴