Abstract
This article adds to the growing field of inquiry into the links between emotions and climate change by arguing that moral outrage can be considered a justified emotional response to climate injustice with the potential to contribute to meaningful climate action. I draw on the work of philosopher Amia Srinivasan to develop this argument, and illustrate it using examples of recent climate action movements, such as the Extinction Rebellion and the Global Climate Strike.
Introduction
This article underscores the importance of bringing emotions into the research focus when analyzing environmental issues. Such an emphasis is warranted, as Western thought has traditionally embraced the passion versus reason or emotion versus cognition duality. 1 Yet emotions are a fundamental part of the human condition, influencing our decisions, actions, judgments, and relationships. As Jasper 2 notes, “emotions are what make us care about the world around us, repelling or attracting us.”
This understanding has been gaining momentum across the social sciences, including sociology, 3 scholarship on social movements, 4 and organization and management studies. 5 This important trend has also been examined in climate change scholarship. The studies linking diverse types of emotions with climate change-related issues and processes have explored the role of emotions in climate change risk perception, 6 climate change negotiations, 7 public support for energy and climate policies, 8 climate change-related mental health issues, 9 climate change communication, 10 and climate action 11 and inaction. 12
This article adds to this growing scholarship by arguing that collectively accrued and shared moral outrage is not only apt 13 within the context of climate change, but may also constitute one of the enabling forces for climate action. I draw on the work of philosopher Amia Srinivasan to develop this argument, and illustrate it using examples of recent climate action movements, such as the Extinction Rebellion and the Global Climate Strike.
As we live in a time of acute environmental changes, growing political polarization, and increasing inequality, we should expect drastic emotional fluctuations around the unfolding climate crisis. Set against this background, the emotional context of climate (in)action gains further importance: if we want to achieve profound and lasting climate action, we need to take into account the accompanying collective emotional dynamics.
This research intervenes in the still unfolding field of inquiry into the links between emotions and climate change by moving the focus from individual manifestations of emotional responses to collective expressions of emotions. I support the view that the study of emotions should go beyond the dominant microlevel of analysis, and that emotions should also be treated as a macrosociological 14 and relational 15 phenomenon, thus probing into the collective psychological context of climate change. 16 The article also responds to the call to investigate the link between the perception of climate change as a moral problem and climate action, with particular focus on the emotional dimension of this linkage. 17 The latter is especially important, as “climate change does not register emotionally as a wrong that demands to be righted.” 18
The remainder of the article is structured as follows. I start by introducing the concept of moral outrage and its connection to injustice and action. Next, I discuss moral outrage within the context of climate change. I conclude by reflecting on the connections between moral outrage and environmental (in)justice.
Moral Outrage: What it is And What it is Not
Moral outrage is a moral emotion, meaning that the feelings are aroused “based on moral intuitions and principles.” 19 In addition, unlike all other types of emotions, moral emotions imply reacting and responding to events and phenomena that do not directly affect the self. 20 Among the plethora of feelings that humans experience, moral emotions are the most stable. Jasper 21 details the typology of feelings based on their longevity and argues that, compared with short-lived reflex emotions and moods, moral emotions last longer and serve as a background for changing moods and reflex emotions. The comparative stability of moral emotions points to their close association with complex cognitive processes, in-depth reflections on society and our place in it, dominant cultural constructions, 22 and moral sensibilities. 23 This leads to two conclusions: First, generating moral emotions involves complex cognitive processes and, therefore, “strongly depends on our understanding of events around us,” 24 especially their social construction as morally significant or insignificant. Therefore, framing an issue as morally problematic is crucial for evoking moral emotions. Second, compared with short-lived and more impulsive sentiments, moral emotions have greater potential to motivate action. 25 That is why moral outrage, as a constructed and cognitively processed emotion, 26 differs from more impulsive or short-lived anger. Scholars in social psychology have distinguished moral outrage from other types of anger, such as personal anger and empathetic anger. Within this distinction, “moral outrage arises when the transgression is against a moral standard, personal anger arises when the transgression is against one's self, and empathic anger arises from seeing someone one cares for treated unfairly.” 27 Moral outrage and empathetic anger can overlap if treating others poorly violates a moral standard, but given the frequent confusion about emotion labels, it is important to point out this conceptual distinction.
Moral outrage, injustice, and action
Moral outrage has been shown to elicit a strong emotional response, thus raising the collective emotional temperature and potentially spurring action. 28 Scholars in social psychology have documented that group-based anger over the violation of moral convictions has the potential to energize collective action, 29 and that compared with the other moral emotions, such as self-focused guilt and other-focused sympathy, moral outrage has the potential to evoke a more “sustained and committed” action. 30
Along the same lines, social movement scholars have long acknowledged the importance of the action-oriented nature of moral outrage in defining and orienting human action. 31 Scholars found that activists cultivate moral outrage directed toward a target that is blamed for the injustice (e.g., government, concrete policy) to enhance mobilization. 32 Flam 33 considers moral outrage to be a “subversive counter-emotion” directed toward opponents or those who uphold “cementing emotions” that reinforce the status quo. For example, Jasper and Nelkin 34 show that activists for the ethical treatment of animals generated moral outrage against large corporations, rhetorically highlighting irreconcilable differences in moral standards held by us and them. One of the tactics to ignite such moral outrage is to employ “moral shock”—“when an unexpected event or piece of information raises such a sense of outrage in a person that she becomes inclined towards political action” regardless of her affiliation with the social movement. 35 In his study of the emotional consequences of the 2010 BP oil spill for the American public, Farrell 36 shows that the large-scale disaster coupled with the intense media coverage resulted in a powerful moral shock. The latter morphed into a significant emotional response manifested in moral outrage that was generated not only within the vicinity of the accident but also across the country. Farrell 37 concludes that “the level of moral outrage in the summer of 2010 produced dramatic increases in awareness and self-reflection about the consequences of the American lifestyle on the environment, and as these data show, dramatic increases in volunteerism and philanthropic giving.”
Moral outrage has been considered particularly relevant to politics and social conflict. The relation of moral outrage to the political domain is twofold: First, moral outrage implies recognition, understanding, and normative evaluation of the political context. 38 Second, both individual and group-based moral outrage are directed outward (unlike self-focused anger), blaming “political agents or systemic unfairness.” 39 The latter can be a government, authority, or more generally the system that causes inequality and injustice. There is ample empirical evidence from social psychology suggesting that moral outrage fosters collective political action—for example, by amplifying the desire to help the underprivileged when confronted with inequality, 40 including the commitment of people in developed countries to help those in developing countries in addressing poverty and preventable diseases 41 (for review see Thomas et al. 42 ).
The role that moral outrage and anger play in political processes recently became the subject of broader philosophical debate. In her book Anger and Forgiveness, Nussbaum 43 makes an argument that anger is not useful, either in private or political realms, and should be abandoned in favor of love. Nussbaum's argument has been critiqued for offering “only part of the story” 44 and overlooking “unjust features of political life—whose anger is taken seriously and whose isn't—as necessary and neutral.” 45 Along the same lines, Leboeuf 46 argues that “if anger, whether tainted by desires for revenge or not, can enable a person to respond to his or her oppression, then there is a place for anger in responding to injustice.”
It is not the aim of this essay to intervene in the broader philosophical debate about the morality of anger, but to reflect on it within the context of the looming climate crisis. I side with those who consider moral outrage to be an important emotion that has the potential to produce collective action. Next, I develop this point within the context of climate change.
Moral Outrage as the Emotional Response to Climate Injustice
Although climate change does not readily register as a moral imperative, 47 it is important not to dismiss the fundamental connection between ethical concepts, such as justice and equity, and the unfolding climate crisis. 48 It has been well established that climate change is fundamentally a moral issue, as its causes and consequences are and will be plagued by different manifestations of injustice. 49 Given the scope and complexity of climate change, the injustice should be understood broadly as affecting not only humans of the present but also those not yet born, as well as the nonhuman realm. 50 The injustice stems from the fact that the causes and impacts of climate change are unequally distributed—those who have contributed or are contributing least are and will be suffering most. 51 This is true on multiple spatial (global, national, and local) and temporal (past, present, and future) scales. It is also well documented that those who are already disadvantaged in various ways will be most vulnerable to the unfolding climate crisis. 52 The injustice also stems from the fact that the existential risks facing those at the climate change frontier are not adequately addressed—the existential and moral urgency of climate action is often dismissed.
Thus, injustice reflected in the causes, impacts, and responses to climate change can be considered as reasons to elicit moral outrage. Moral outrage in this analysis is conceptualized as an issue-, time-, and context-contingent phenomenon; that is, it is focused on a specific issue or process as it unfolds in historical, political, social, and cultural contexts. But in all of these instances moral outrage will be elicited by an understanding of the unfairness and injustice brought by causes, consequences, and responses to climate change. We may get outraged because of the events and processes happening in proximity to us, such as unusual weather extremes or eroding soil, but climate change also has a global impact. We may get outraged about losing not only something that is spatially close to us but also something that is valuable for humanity—the slow death of coral reefs, the painful vulnerability of those in post-Hurricane Maria Puerto Rico, or the scary unpredictability of disintegrating permafrost. Being a moral emotion signifies exactly this possibility: we can allow ourselves to get angry about things that we consider to be unfair, even though they may not necessarily affect our everyday existence (at least not yet). We can also get outraged about the lack of political will to pursue convincing and bold climate action, or the irresponsibility of those in power who either ignore climate change altogether or downplay its significance. The latter is very well illustrated by Greta Thunberg's
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passionate speech at the UN Climate Action Summit in September 2019:
This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!
Greta Thunberg's speech (and the way she delivered it) is part of the recently emerging climate action movements that contain a recognizable element of moral outrage. Even the names of these movements, such as “Extinction Rebellion” and “Global Climate Strike,” signal that anger is one of the moving forces behind them. Both “rebellion” and “strike” show that these movements are about disruption of the status quo, of the way things are done and decided, but they are also about giving oneself license to be outraged. As Sir David Attenborough commented on school climate strikes, “their outrage is certainly justified, there is no doubt about that.”
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Thus, we can argue that moral outrage in response to climate change-related injustice and inaction is apt. Amia Srinivasan
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explains:
…getting angry is a means of affectively registering or appreciating the injustice of the world, and that our capacity to get aptly angry is best compared with our capacity for aesthetic appreciation. …there might well be a value to appreciating the injustice of the world through one's apt anger—a value that is distinct from that of simply knowing that the world is unjust. [emphasis in the original]
Here anger is not only the facilitator of collective action but also an emotion that can help disadvantaged and marginalized groups re(claim) their agency. While drawing on Audre Lorde's work on how and why women respond to racism through anger, Amia Srinivasan explains this point: “For Lorde, women's anger is not only a ‘source of energy’ that can directly serve political ends, but also a source of ‘clarification’, a means by which women can come to better see their oppression.” 56 This is an important point, as moral outrage is the way not only to disrupt the structural forces that create the injustice in the first place, such as racism and colonialism, but also to reflect and act on the oppression that they have caused, and thus re(gain) agency. Examples of this phenomenon include the historical case of the opposition to the landfill in Warren County, NC, led by the African American community there; the more recent resurgence of indigenous peoples in defense of their rights to land and self-determination, such as the collective defiance of Native Americans against the North Dakota Pipeline; and the emergence of the voices of future generations in climate action discourse through Greta Thunberg. In these historic and present-day cases moral outrage is outwardly directed (as discussed in the section Moral Outrage, Injustice, and Action) not only and not necessarily toward individual perpetrators but also toward systems of social arrangement that enable environmental injustice. 57 This aligns with the calls by environmental justice scholars to move beyond the specific manifestations of environmental injustice and consider the broader underlying forces that enable them. 58
Conclusion
This article discusses moral outrage as a justified emotional response to climate injustice. Moral outrage is conceptualized as a collective moral emotion that is used to draw attention to, and possibly address, climate injustice. The article does not claim that moral outrage alone will be enough to ignite climate action. Certainly, climate action and inaction are complex phenomena comprising a combination of factors, processes, and agents. 59 However, the article aims to draw attention to the importance and power of emotions when reacting to climate injustice, especially when these emotions are collectively accrued and expressed.
Moral outrage is closely linked with the concept of environmental/climate injustice in three specific ways. First, moral outrage as a moral emotion is about the unfair treatment of the Other—the central theme in environmental justice scholarship: it is always the Other, disadvantaged in different ways, who bears the burden of unjust decisions, processes, and policies related to environment- and climate-related issues. Second, moral outrage has the potential to trigger action—that is, to convert the emotions aroused in protest of the unfair treatment of the Other into productive work. Collectively accrued and shared moral outrage, in combination with other factors, can potentially lead to overcoming the social inertia associated with climate change. 60 And third, moral outrage can create an emotional avenue for unfairly treated Others to (re)claim their agency.
The argument of this article highlights the importance of framing climate change as a moral problem, as moral outrage can be produced if the phenomenon is deemed morally problematic, or unjust. To evoke a sense of injustice, the situation needs to be framed as unjust; the conditions that cause inequality, suffering, and injustice need to be articulated and connected to people's beliefs about what is right and wrong. 61 The latter can be achieved by framing climate change in moral terms not only in academic scholarship, but also in political discourse and media reporting, and as climate change does not readily register as a moral imperative, 62 more work needs to be done in this direction.
Footnotes
Author Disclosure Statement
No competing financial interests exist.
Funding Information
No funding was received for this article.