PhD: Contestation in the Anthropocene
On 25 January I successfully defended my dissertation on civil disobedience and the climate crisis at the University of Amsterdam. It was an amazing day and I’m very grateful to everyone who helped me get there. You can read more about my dissertation below, and download the entire manuscript here.
Summary:
CONTESTATION IN THE ANTHROPOCENE: Climate change and civil disobedience
Despite the widespread public understanding of the dangers posed by climate change, action taken by political leaders to prevent, or even slow climate change has not been nearly enough to prevent significant planetary warming. It is widely acknowledged that more needs to be done to reduce the emission of greenhouse gasses. The Paris Treaty of 2015 commits all the signatories to try and prevent warming of more than 2 degrees centigrade, with 1,5 degrees of warming set as an aspirational goal. Despite this commitment, adequate political action to deal effectively with climate change has not been forthcoming. In response to this lack of action, some individuals and groups have turned to civil disobedience as a way of trying to bring about the change necessary to deal with climate crisis. This is a relatively new development and differs in important ways from previous issues where civil disobedience played an important part in the struggle for justice. What sets climate justice civil disobedience campaigns apart from previous struggles is its transnational character and its intergenerational concern.
It is transnational in two senses: the first is that disobedient actions sometimes take place across borders (e.g. shutting down cross-border pipelines); the second is that disobedient actions against climate injustice often involve individuals from different states acting together. At the same time, many engaging in climate-related disobedience are motivated by concerns of intergenerational justice. The transnational and intergenerational character of many of the recent acts of climate justice civil disobedience raise some interesting questions about the normative basis on which these actions might be defended. Much of the philosophical work on civil disobedience deals with the question of how the pro tanto obligation to obey the law could be legitimately ignored in specific situations that relate to issues that take place on a limited time horizon. This work has largely focused on the reasons that citizens of a given state might have for engaging in civil disobedience in their own state.
Making sense of how cross-border movements engaging in civil disobedience could justify their actions raises a host of interesting and under-theorised conceptual and normative questions. The aim of this dissertation is to investigate some of these questions in the context of liberal democratic states. The central argument put forward in this dissertation is that civil disobedience in democratic states is a morally permissible way for individuals to act together in pursuit of climate justice. My claim is that individuals have a personal responsibility to work with others to establish just institutions that would bring about climate justice and that in the context of insufficient action by the states in which they reside, they have a pro tanto duty to engage in civil disobedience to pursue this objective. Furthermore, I claim that those engaging in climate justice civil disobedience should be guided by both prefigurative and pragmatic considerations when making decisions about the specific form their disobedience should take. The argument is presented across four chapters.
In Chapter 1, I deal with the question of how to define civil disobedience and discuss why this matters for thinking about acts of principled law-breaking motivated by concerns about climate justice. I review some of the key issues in the debate about how to approach the definition of civil disobedience. I reject the normatively loaded definition favoured by Rawls, as well as attempts to formulate new categories of resistance (e.g. ‘uncivil disobedience’). Instead, I embrace a rather minimal definition of civil disobedience that allows for a wide variety of principled acts of law-breaking to be understood as civil disobedience.
In Chapter 2, I discuss different ways of arguing for the moral permissibility of using climate justice civil disobedience in (more-or-less) democratic states. I start by discussing the possibility of using what may be termed ‘the irreversibility argument’, which claims that the potential of irreversible harms occurring due to climate change justifies political intervention in the form of civil disobedience. I then turn to the epistemic argument for climate justice civil disobedience. This argument claims that the political system has immunised itself against the facts about climate change and that normal political practices have been unable to communicate the seriousness of the dangers posed by the climate crisis. Lastly, I deal with what could be called the ‘democratic’ argument for climate justice civil disobedience. Here the argument is that young people today (as well as those not yet born) are not adequately represented by existing political systems, which constitutes a democratic deficit. Individuals or groups acting on behalf of those not adequately represented can use civil disobedience in an attempt to remedy this deficit. I argue that, taken together, these three arguments offer substantial support for the moral permissibility of using of civil disobedience to oppose a lack of action on climate change at a domestic level.
Chapter 3 deals with the issue of civil disobedience at the global, or transnational level. Here the focus is on arguments that could justify climate justice civil disobedience by appealing to reasons related to transnational or global concerns, rather than domestic reasons. I begin by discussing two ways of trying to justify climate justice disobedience at the transnational level. The first uses the idea of a climate emergency to claim that civil disobedience is a necessary response to inaction. The second appeals to the idea of the All-Affected Principle to justify the use of civil disobedience to widen the forum for democratic decision-making. I argue that neither approach offers an entirely convincing way to defend the use of climate justice civil disobedience at a transnational level. In the final part of the chapter, I argue that an appeal to the natural duty of justice does provide a well-grounded justification for using civil disobedience as a means of addressing the climate crisis at a global level.
In Chapter 4, I deal with the question of how we are to evaluate the actions of groups using civil disobedience to further climate justice aims, and whether certain individuals may have a duty to engage in this type of disobedience. I discuss the difficulties that come with any decision to engage in civil disobedience and tentatively put forward some ways of thinking about them. I develop a framework for moral decision-making that offers guidance on how to act for those who believe that they may be justified in using civil disobedience to advance climate justice goals. I argue that those wishing to engage in climate justice civil disobedience should use the notion of prefiguration to think about the types of actions they plan to engage in, but that they must also take pragmatic political concerns into account. I then go onto argue that the idea of structural injustice can help to explain who has a (pro tanto) duty to engage in climate justice civil disobedience. I end the chapter by discussing the contribution that climate justice civil disobedience can make in responding to the climate crisis.
The most important insights developed by this dissertation is that approaching the climate crisis from a philosophical, rather than economic or technological perspective will provide important insights about our responsibilities to respond to the climate crisis.
