A vignette about environmentalist Colin Beavan’s experience of and reflection on environmental guilt and shame introduces the texture of these moral emotions experienced by many everyday environmentalists and sets the stage for the ensuing analysis. Taking this moral experience seriously reveals underexplored motivations and hindrances to environmental action, guilt, and shame. Reflection on these moral emotions challenges many modern ethical assumptions and forms the basis of the three main ethical arguments of the book: that collectives as well as individuals have guilt, shame, and responsibility; that some individuals and collectives should feel guilt and shame for environmental degradation including climate change; and that, given the consequences of guilt and shame, they should not be intentionally induced unless a number of conditions, which can be fostered through rituals, are met. These conditions are also necessary to respond to unintentionally elicited guilt and shame. To set the stage for these theoretical and practical arguments, the Introduction names the ethical values which influence the text and the disciplinary resources from social psychology; ethical pragmatism; virtue ethics; and religious studies, especially ritual theory, used in the project. It also delineates the scope of the book as the Western developed world, particularly the United States, and environmental guilt and shame, of which climate change is the main example.
Mentioning the Sample’s Country in the Article’s Title Leads to Bias in Research Evaluation
