Ritual Responses to Environmental Guilt and Shame

Having articulated the conditions to respond to or induce environmental guilt and shame, it is reasonable to wonder how humans could develop such resources. Chapter 9 maintains that religious rituals have the ability to create and sustain the conditions. This argument is founded on two strands of thought: J. Z. Smith and Catherine Bell’s theories of ritual, particularly regarding rites of affliction, which respond to disorder or wrong and provide terminology for conceiving of ritual in general. Studies of environmental ritual, especially the work of William R. Jordan III, Gretel van Wieren, and Joanna Macy who identify ritual as a way of responding to negative experiences, affects, and states of being, enable the consideration of environmental rituals. Their work requires expansion to deal relationships between humans or involving collectives, particularly the need to apologize to those harmed and change behavior to prevent further harm. Spontaneous confessional rituals about environmental guilt and shame in popular online confessions and an apology ritual at the Standing Rock prayer camp against the Dakota Access Pipeline exhibit some of these features but are still limited with respect to the conditions required to respond to guilt and shame. Thus, intentional ritualization and using multiple rituals will likely be necessary to respond to all of the dimensions of guilt and shame.

The Ethics of Inducing and Responding to Guilt and Shame

If agents are to consider intentionally inducing guilt or shame, as so many do, guidelines are needed to ensure that the practice is ethical and has the desired, and significant, effects. Guidelines to shape responses to environmental guilt and shame are also necessary even they are not intentionally induced given their prevalence in human experience. Chapter 8 addresses these concerns by articulating a set of “conditions” or characteristics needed in the shamer, shamee, their relationship, the broader community and the physical system in order to ethically respond to or induce guilt or shame. These conditions include relationality; trust in, credibility of and authority of those shaming; moral support; values; a vision of identity that takes account of human limits and failure while maintaining the possibility of at least partial success; participatory processes; identifying with an other; critical self-assessment and transformation; and action. As maintaining all of these conditions at once is difficult at best, intentionally inducing shame is even more ethically challenging than suggested previously. Because these conditions are also needed to respond to guilt and shame, people should foster them regardless of their intent to induce guilt or shame.

Responding to Critics of Emotions and Collectives

Chapter 6 explore three questions: why other climate ethicists including Dale Jamieson, Stephen M. Gardiner, and Tracy Lynn Isaacs have not examined moral emotions or the negative emotions of guilt and shame; why their philosophical assumptions prevent them from doing so; and what the advantages are of taking guilt and shame seriously in environmental and climate ethics. Philosophical climate ethics generally prioritizes rational, individual analyses and direct linear causality. These commitments are challenged by the complex layers of agency causing climate change and lead scholars to overlook (1) the contributions of guilt and shame to moral development and (2) how such moral emotions can help agents recognize their as-yet unacknowledged moral commitments––particularly critical tasks in rapidly developing moral circumstances such as that of climate change. Additionally, philosophical commitments of most climate ethicists hinder their recognition of important ethical questions: What are the ethical ramifications of environmental guilt and shame? Should agents intentionally induce them? Regardless of how these emotions come to exist, how should agents respond to them? A more capacious vision of ethics as outlined in this project—which draws on insights of laypeople as well as academics in multiple disciplines; includes rationality, emotion, relationships; acknowledges the agency of individuals and collectives; and recognizes human limits—can address a broader scope of ethical questions including but not limited to those sparked by environmental guilt and shame.

Introduction

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.

Philosophical Arguments for Individuals, Memberships, and Collectives in States of Guilt or Shame

While there is ample evidence that people experience collective guilt and shame, many philosophers and laypeople reject such experiences as unjustified either because they reject emotions as significant realms of experience or because they dismiss the possibility of collective agency and therefore find guilt or shame feelings about collective acts, like those leading to climate change, absurd. Chapter 4 addresses these concerns, building an account of collective agency, responsibility, and identity that demonstrates the importance of moral emotions including those of collectives. This argument draws on but extends the work of multiple philosophers and theologians including Karl Jaspers, Larry May, and Tracy Lynn Isaacs to argue that individuals, memberships, and collectives can be guilty and shameful and that collective and individual guilt and/or shame do not reduce to each other. Collectives have identity, agency, and a form of intent that is more than the sum of their constituent agents. Collectives include both well-defined collectives, such as corporations or nations, and diffuse collectives such as people living resource-intensive capitalist lives and/or supercollectives––those which are larger than but not reducible to collectives. They may contribute to climate change alongside individuals, membership groups, and well-defined collectives. The chapter also argues why in some cases it is not only possible but also appropriate to experience environmental guilt and shame about climate change as an individual or collective.

Ethics of Environmental Guilt and Shame

Chapter 7 articulates the ethics of intentionally inducing environmental guilt or shame. It considers two competing views: Martha C. Nussbaum’s argument against shaming individuals because of their dignity and the ease with which shamers can abuse power is echoed in the work of the few environmental ethicists who have considered environmental shaming. Jennifer Jacquet’s support of shaming, especially collectives, in an era of climate change given the urgent need to act, offers a counterpoint. These concerns of dignity, power, and expediency are joined by others, including the injustice of the disproportionate shaming of certain groups, especially women, and the unique challenges of shaming collectives in the most prominent types of environmental shaming, environmental marketing and naming-and-shaming campaigns. The risks of shaming are so great that it cannot be used lightly, even as its benefits and apparent inevitability among humans suggests that it cannot be completely ruled out.

Environmental Guilt and Shame

With a typology of guilt and shame and philosophical justification for both individual and collectives experiencing environmental guilt and shame in hand, Chapter 5 returns to and expands upon the evidence of environmental guilt and shame to explore how well the theories align with the evidence. It demonstrates that that all of the elements of the typology, including collective guilt and shame, are found in accounts of environmental guilt and shame. As collective guilt and shame are likely to be most controversial to readers and have the least evidence in the previously examined data, Chapter 5 supplements the sources examined in Chapter 2, with additional popular and academic literature about collective guilt and shame, particularly claims about the human species in Anthropocene literature and the existence of naming and shaming campaigns which target governments and corporations judged to contribute to environmental degradation. The presence of so many forms of environmental guilt and shame in popular culture indicate that a multifaceted response to these moral emotions and the actions and conditions that give rise to them is necessary.

Typology of Guilt and Shame

Because primary sources about environmental guilt and shame discussed in Chapter 2 do not define or differentiate guilt or shame consistently, systematically explore their implications, or explain the notions of collective agency that they presume, Chapter 3 constructs a typology of guilt and shame to stabilize the subsequent analysis. It uses material from moral and social psychology, especially work by June Price Tangney and her colleagues, as well as social, historical, and philosophical studies of collective experiences of guilt and shame after the Holocaust and other atrocities. The state of being guilty or shameful occurs when an agent breaks or fails to live up to their ideals. “Guilt” here refers to the actions and shame to the conditions of the agent’s identity under these circumstances. Guilt and shame feelings are negative emotions about such actions (guilt) or assessments of identity (shame). Guilt and shame states and feelings can refer to individuals, membership groups, or collectives. Memberships are groups in which the individuals are the agents, whereas collectives have agency, identity, and responsibility more than the sum of the individuals in them. Agents can also judge another as guilty or shameful and/or attempt to instill guilt or shame feelings in them; such judgments depend in part on the cultural views of guilt and/or shame. The distinctions articulated in this typology are analytically and practically useful but are not absolute, as different types of guilt and shame may co-occur or catalyze each other.

Epilogue Looking Back, Looking Forward

The epilogue summarizes the contributions of studying environmental guilt and shame to environmental ethics and sets agendas for future research. Even as approaching environmental ethics as a finger-wagging scold is ethically suspect, it is also problematic to avoid the study of negative emotions given the many insights prompted by such study. Questions of motivation deserve more attention in environmental ethics, as the paralyzing character of shame among people with environmental values indicates that environmental values are not enough to spark environmental behavior as many environmental ethicists presume. Other future lines of inquiry include how demographic factors beyond gender, such as race and class, affect the experience of environmental guilt and shame and how environmental rituals may foster environmental and climate apology, restitution, adaptation, and mitigation. Addressing both the theoretical and applied ethical insights arising from environmental guilt and shame not only leads to richer accounts of responsibility and agency that better fit the phenomena but also enables more well-rounded approaches to environmental degradation than those that eschew emotions, the experience of laypeople, and collectives. Without such approaches, denial, paralysis, or incomplete and therefore unsuccessful approaches to environmental degradation including climate change are likely.

Evidence of Environmental Guilt and Shame

Chapter 2 compiles evidence for the existence of environmental guilt and shame in the contemporary Western developed world, particularly the United States, from blogs and discussion boards; environmental self-help books and memoirs; broader indicators of cultural trends including comics, TV shows, newspaper articles, marketing studies, and counseling programs; and the few academic studies of the topic. I demonstrate that environmental guilt and shame are commonplace in parts of contemporary U.S. American society, particularly among middle- and upper-class environmentally conscious people. People feel guilt and shame about a wide range of daily activities including their choice of grocery bag, food, and transportation. People experiencing these moral emotions often do so both as individuals and as parts of a collective whether family, community, nation, species, or sometimes diffuse collective (i.e. “industrialized people”). Confessions of and responses to environmental guilt and shame take a religious cast as people confess their wrongs, ask for help in changing their actions, and particularly desire assistance in dealing with the existential ramifications of their actions, and subsequently shape their individual and collective identities.