Climate change

Caney, Jonas, and the limits of conventional ethics

Simon Caney’s (2010) paper offers insight into the strengths and weaknesses of much of the liberal tradition when it addresses responsibility for climate change. This applies both to Caney’s assessment of the contributions of some other liberal theorists, who, he correctly argues, miss the point in assuming that countries should be regarded as the sole responsible actors, but also to his own contribution where he defends ultimately the standard of individual responsibility in a cosmopolitan frame of reference. In defending the standard of individual responsibility, Caney is among those liberal thinkers who oppose the idea of locating primary responsibility for meeting the various costs of climate change within established political communities, arguing that the ‘elementary’ standard of the individual should be the primary locus of both rights and responsibilities in the contemporary, in tendency cosmopolitan, world. This position builds on a long liberal tradition that sees the interests of individuals as at the normative core of all forms of legitimate political association. Methodologically, the attraction of this position from this standpoint is that the normative core of politics can be centred on autonomous individuals who can then associate to establish responsible regimes of freedom and justice. Contra much sociological scepticism about the validity of this idea, it should be asserted right away that no normative theory of democratic legitimacy can be advanced without individual autonomy being at its core. The argument should not be over the necessity of autonomy, but the manner in which it should properly be constituted and institutionally realized.

The way in which Caney utilizes the idea of individual responsibility is not sufficiently developed because it ignores precisely how individual autonomy might be constituted and realized. While it is true that preserving the capacity for individual reflection, and hence individual taking of responsibility, must be a core aspiration of any democratic political system, individuals do not act alone, nor do they even reflect beyond the mediation of others, pace Rawls’s theory of reflective equilibrium (Rawls, 1993). Though I cannot justify the full development of the argument here, following in the pragmatist tradition to which one could add the later Wittgenstein, it is implausible to construe individual reasoning as something that occurs indifferently to a shared and evolving linguistically accessed cultural stock of knowledge. On this basis, we have to consider the language-bound mechanisms of individuation and the formation of subjects and ask, rather than presume, whether they exhibit requisite capacities for issue-relevant levels of autonomy and responsibility. At present, it is apparently rather more the case that these kinds of subjects are not prevalent with regard to the deep moral grammar of climate change and other far-reaching global normative questions. So, on this basis, it is hard to imagine how individuals might be held accountable as individuals if they are not equipped, by virtue of collective structures and mechanisms that exceed their influence, with the requisite moral reasoning capacities to make sense of their responsibilities.

Even if it were to be somehow argued that an individual could reflect entirely alone and reach the ‘right’ conclusions, for example, that she and others like her should take on additional burdens as a consequence of historical advantages, she would still not be able to take remedial action alone, but only through the mediation of institutions and systems. So any reflections that individuals might achieve on their own would have to be translated into common aggregated positions and also shape systems of action that would translate the corresponding intentions into consistent action sequences. The individuals would therefore have to take collective responsibility for their aggregated individual positions in line with the order of justice in which they have participated. So, even if were to be granted that individuals could reflect and reach right conclusions alone, they would still have to take collective responsibility for the consequences of joint actions. And while Caney criticizes the idea of holding collectivities responsible for historically accrued advantages on various grounds, such as not punishing them for lack of foresight about the implications of industrialization that was simply not historically available, his argument lacks one critical assumption which is that individuals and collectivities could in the right circumstances morally reason that they actually should, by certain reasonable standards, bear responsibility for their own advantages in line with the principle of cosmopolitan solidarity.

Ultimately, Caney has a ‘suffering’ rather than active theory of the attribution of responsibility to individuals. These individuals have interests that can be identified but they appear to lack capacity for willed collective action, such as the capacity to recognize as a basis for acting now that collectivities to which they belong gained advantage historically by suppressing and exploiting members of other collectivities, vitally including the key factor of constructed geographical disadvantages arising from colonialism.

The essence of these arguments always go back to the vital distinction between preserving and extending the status of the individual as the appropriate holder of rights and responsibilities and the mechanisms for realizing, not alone such rights and responsibilities, but the very individuals that carry them. When mechanisms, which can be of a discursive or material kind, are brought into play, it becomes apparent that individuals cannot do it on their own and it is the associational forms in which they act that play the decisive role in defining rights and responsibilities, including accepting responsibility for addressing climate change. At this point, notwithstanding the many and important differences between different strands of liberal theory, the retention of the primacy of individual agency in most of them, a primary strength in normative terms becomes a decided weakness in explanatory power. It either leaves a thin cosmopolitanism, like that of Caney’s, without mechanisms for its realization or, to the contrary, the embedding of these individuals into collectivities, ‘peoples’, which become responsible for the vindication of individual rights within territorially bounded communities (Rawls, 1999), but at the cost of an empirically and normatively adequate grounding of responsibility viewed from a cosmopolitan standpoint. In some contrast to both versions of liberalism, individuals’ responsibility only begins to make sense when their contribution to the actions of democratically constituted associations grant them the power to influence what should happen in the world and, for this, understanding the social mechanisms that facilitate or obstruct this power is fundamental.

These remarks already point in the radical direction of Hans Jonas’s critique of contemporary ethical theories that was an important part of his principle of responsibility. Jonas advanced the principle of responsibility as a critique of the direction of modern, industrial civilization, whose rationality, in his view, had to be transformed if the threat to the natural foundation of life was to be overcome. A primary foundation for the realization of the new ethics that would be at the core of the principle of responsibility was a decisive break with the assumption that individuals could fully foresee the consequences of their actions and hence could assess whatever degree of moral responsibility attended to them. Jonas’s emphasis on the limited capacity to foresee secondary consequences of actions that were part of complex functionally reproduced action systems involved a significant shift towards a consequential rather than deontological reading of morality. It also involved a post-Kantian emphasis on collective as opposed to individual responsibility.

Jonas’s emphasis on the necessity of collective responsibility was animated by the planetary ecological crisis. The lack of foreseeability of the consequences of action above all arose due to their unpredictable ecological implications. Humankind had to accept responsibility for the endangerment of nature as a whole, including its own natural living conditions. This involved the necessity of renouncing the modern utopianism of nature-dominating progress with its ethically neutral concept of technical advance. Instead, Jonas argued that a non-anthropocentric relationship with nature must be developed that would be based on recognizing its intrinsic limitedness and vulnerability in the face of human goals.

In drawing attention to natural limits, Jonas gave form to the environmentalist philosophy that would be partly taken up in the leading idea of sustainable development that came to prominence in the 1980s (O’Mahony and Skillington, 1996). But, it is at least arguable that the idea of sustainable development remains an anthropocentric frame in whose interstices lies an anthropocentric core idea. This core idea is that human development has de facto priority and that sustainability goals can be accommodated within this regime. This contradicts a core tenet of Jonas’s ideas for a new foundation of ethics, that it must break with anthropocentrism and recognize the intrinsic value of non-human nature. This would have radical implications in that it would change the presumption of industrial civilization that scientific-technical ‘inventions’ represent a basic freedom and the associated idea that questions as to the legitimacy of their use may only be raised at the point of application, rather than being directed at their genesis.

One other important aspect of Jonas’s critique of the dominant philosophical ethics is its assumption of the constancy of human nature. The founding idea that humans, the subjects of ethics, are simultaneously purposive-rational in pursuit of interests and irrational in their expression of needs leads to a self-imposed restriction on ethics. It makes political ethics in particular appear as a working-out of basic principles suited to a timeless idea of human nature. Or, at least, that nature has been assumed not to be subject to variation since the advent of early modern natural law. By contrast, as Strydom shows, the human mind undergoes evolutionary variation on an ongoing basis (Strydom, article in this volume). And, in any given era, social life is underpinned by a range of cognitive structures that generate various possibilities for the expression of rationality (Habermas, 2003). It is an unfortunate consequence of the influence of positivism in both philosophy and the social sciences to assume the enduring dominance of purposive rationality in organizing collective arrangements, a viewpoint that has penetrated far into ethics.

For Jonas, the necessity of developing a future-oriented ethics of responsibility reveals the limits of traditional ethics with its focus on how past actions are morally relevant in the present. Jonas argues for the liberation of ethics from the consideration of the factual justifiability of past actions towards value-based consideration of what constitutes responsible actions bearing on the future. This is quite in contrast to Caney’s approach, which does not explicitly consider the future. Caney argues that individuals are exonerated from responsibility from past actions to which they did not assent even if they did benefit from these actions. Hence, individuals in prosperous countries cannot be held responsible for the consequences of industrialization for climate change, given that they did not knowingly assent to such damaging actions. But this position can really only be sustained if we adopt a strictly limited duty-bound conception of ethics. From a less strict perspective, it would be perfectly possible for individuals engaged in a practical discourse about their responsibilities to recognize the benefits they have gained at the expense of others, even unwittingly, and agree to take on additional responsibility for the consequences of global warming. The critical point is not that Caney does not develop a range of subtle considerations on responsibility, but that they are applied from a detached, impartial perspective that has a restrictive effective on possible reasoning. This perspective allocates responsibilities from the outside based on factual states of affairs, rather than allowing agents to work them up intersubjectively from the inside with an eye both to the nature of the responsibilities they might assume and how they might assume them. The latter approach therefore brings in a wider range of consideration and also a wider range of possible actions.

Jonas’s perspective of a future-oriented ethics of responsibility in broadening the range of possible consideration moves in a different direction to Caney and much other liberal theorizing. Caney’s view that theorists can directly propose ethical principles to address climate change – such as polluter pays or beneficiary pays – assumes a close relationship to, and quite a high degree of confidence in, institutional norms and practices. But the critical diagnostic and prognostic implications of Jonas’s principle of responsibility carry with it the implication that the depth of cultural reorientation needed will also require significant changes to existing institutions, even extending to the very human agents themselves that shape institutions. Read from this standpoint, contemporary climate change discourse focused on multilateral intergovernmental negotiations on emissions will only ever address part of the issue. Its deeper and indispensable complement is a changed cultural orientation towards embracing the radical moral implications carried by the ecologically sharpened responsibility ethic. From Jonas’s standpoint, this will require a break with the dominant rationality, which a restricted distributive theory of justice tends to reinforce. Ultimately with climate change, the problem is not the distribution of goods or bads; the problem is the very mechanisms of their production in the first place. And, as Forst emphasizes, the mechanisms of producing justice itself are of primary importance (Forst, 2007). For Jonas, justice implies justifiability that, in contemporary circumstances, has to be considered from the standpoint of the future and from that of a nature-respecting practical rationality that is adequate to meet the challenge posed by the expansion of technical rationality. A priori deontological ethics based on presupposed moral capacities of individuals will not suffice.

In the spirit of Jonas, and following the ideas of Iris Marion Young, it may be claimed that the expansion of practical rationality so as to embrace responsibility for an ecologically endangered future will require more than a negative duty not to harm others (Young, 2006, 2007, 2011). It will require a positive duty to arrange the conditions of life so that harm may not incur either to others or the biosphere on which all depend. The principle of negative duty in a global context has proved to be wholly insufficient, at least as currently understood, to build anything remotely approximating to global justice. As it currently operates with regard to the persistence of global poverty, respect for human rights, and ecological questions, it operates so as to offer a type of easing of the conscience of the privileged and the powerful, who can delimit their spheres of responsibility. Knowledge of the interdependent contexts of life has made it apparent that negative duties cannot be clearly specified in a normatively satisfactory manner. As a generation of work on global justice has taught us, so far-reaching are their implications that, as negative duties, they were not fulfilled. And, in any case, the boundary lines between such far-reaching negative duties and positive duties become impossible to sustain. Justice cannot be introduced after the fact of gross maldistribution of primary goods on a global scale. It must be predicated on fair terms of participation in the production of these primary goods in the first place. The necessary positive duty is therefore to establish a fair scheme of global cooperation. Hence, powerful and privileged countries face an acute dilemma. Building the kind of global normative culture that could create the motivation and deliberative capacity to address climate change will require establishing a fair scheme of cooperation that reaches far beyond climate change.

Climate change, democracy, and responsibility

Jonas’s account of future-oriented responsibility crystallizes important aspects of the responsibility question for our time. This account is pessimistic as to how it might be realized, and, for this reason, as well as his conservative personal philosophy, he envisages it as being implemented through elite and intellectual means. Such means could involve setting aside the human aspiration to freedom, at least for the period in which a new rationality might be constructed, and take a non-democratic form. The necessary transformation of practical reason would therefore not be democratically achieved. It would instead be a universalism from the top in which the necessary goals to achieve planetary survival could be implemented with a likelihood of success.

Apel drew on Jonas’s idea of an ethic of responsibility, while also criticizing and developing new foundations for it. He shared with Jonas a crisis diagnosis of the endangerment of humanity and the corresponding need for a future-oriented macro-ethic that would make humanity responsible for the consequences of its actions and would provide foundations for organizing collective actions on a planetary basis. Like Jonas, the most important ground for this enhanced responsibility is the extension of action capability brought about by the technical capacities of an industrial civilization. But Apel, unlike Jonas, attached primary importance to an idea of co-responsibility that was manifested within an ethic of communication. The idea is that all should be equally responsible for coordinating collective actions by having an equal opportunity to discursively participate in shaping solutions to the challenges thrown up by contemporary civilization. In various ways, ultimately springing from the egalitarian universalism of his approach, Apel further differentiates himself from Jonas’s reading of the implications of responsibility. Discursively achieved co-responsibility emphasizes a mechanism for realizing shared responsibility that does not depend on ontologically fixed categories of the individual (Caney) or the collectivity (Jonas) that might carry it, though individual responsibility can be realized in a mediated form through the discursively controlled operation of institutions. In this sense, Apel operates with a procedural reading of responsibility, which retains in the form of discourse ethics an important deontological component, that is at some variance from Jonas’s ontologically derived assessment of those conditions of social life and scientific progress that threaten the integrity of human life and nature. This difference also feeds into another one, the contrasting treatment of the progress frame. Apel insists upon the continuing relevance of the idea of progress through the appropriate reconciliation of technical and practical reason, where Jonas argues for an anti-modernist giving up of the idea of progress faced with the material threat to the continuation of the planet. Finally, and critically, responsibility for Apel is not a directed phenomenon that could involve the imposition of substantive principles by an elite, but is conceived as a reciprocal process of the giving and taking of reasons by all affected parties.

Apel divides his account of discourse ethics into Part A and Part B. Part B is brought in to recognize, beyond all forms of ideal theory, that the world, as he put it in contrast to Rawls, has already gone on and to some considerable extent has gone in the wrong direction (Apel, 1993b). Hence, conditions for the full realization of the ideal of discourse ethics are not foreseeable. Part B, then, seeks to compensate for developing an account of discourse ethics in which the world is also characterized by strategic rational behaviour, and communicative reason is forced to operate indirectly. The core idea of Part B of discourse ethics is that though the ideal discourse community of Part A is not available, its possibility is always counterfactually anticipated in action situations. Whereas Part B of discourse ethics involves the blending of strategic-rational and ideal communicative action, the realization of progress may make the conditions of ideal discourse more actual and less counterfactual. In Kantian terms, the regulative idea of ideal communication becomes ever more realized. It may be added that no democratic society could operate without a sufficient degree of hegemony of those norms that represent the premises of ideal communication. When it does not do so, it turns cynical, as can be witnessed by the deterioration of the moral conditions of life in many democracies over the last quarter century.

For Apel, co-responsibility is built into the form of communication itself. The question of responsibility grows in significance when the communicative coordination of collective action has to address issues that bear on planetary survival. But Apel’s two ideas of responsibility come from different sources. The one, discursive co-responsibility, derives from the language-immanent capacity and obligation to coordinate actions with others. The other, ecological responsibility in Jonas’s sense, is the imperative to realize responsible action to ensure planetary survival. The second idea of responsibility can only be achieved by the adequate realization of the first and this co-dependence underlines the need for a planetary macro-ethic of discursively achieved co-responsibility.

These three theories of responsibility, Caney’s liberal cosmopolitan theory, Jonas’s idea of building an imperative normative culture based on the principle of responsibility, and Apel’s theory of discursive co-responsibility offer in combination valuable insight into how to make sense of climate change. Caney remains relatively close to the political rationality of the system of institutions, but insists this is compatible with the responsibility to fully respect individual freedom. If individuals are fully free, as Caney insists they must be, then they are the core responsible agents. Thus, at bottom, this is a micro theory of individual responsibility, which, though short of mechanisms and concern for the actual forms of legitimate normative culture, emphasizes a normative standard of individual freedom that must be recognized in institutional principles and procedures.

Jonas’s theory is a macro-theory in the sense of offering a macro-ethic that is an authoritative translation of the principle of responsibility. He does not flinch at following the implications through to the non-democratic elite specification and enforcement of a normative culture of obligation. Jonas abridges Weber’s distinction between an ethic of conviction and of responsibility and advances an account of responsibility as a substantive ethic of conviction. Yet, shorn of its authoritarian application, it is the case that some substantive orientation must be part of any viable macro-ethic. Substantive convictions first arise on the margins of civil society as pre-procedural orientations that are argued out in the public sphere. The outcomes of such argumentation are rarely consensual in the sense of the consensual agreement on one right norm, but reflect continuing ideological differentiation and conflict in civil society (O’Mahony, 2013). Hence, substantive convictions such as Jonas’s idea of ecological responsibility do not arrive ready-made in perfect procedures. They normally first anchor themselves in particular milieus in civil society, generate compatible cognitive strategies of reflection and argumentation, and then, in successful cases, penetrate, even in some cases generate, normative culture. If the above remarks reflect a ‘processual’ translation of Jonas’s ethic of responsibility, the underlying idea is nonetheless that Jonas is right to draw attention in a pre-procedural fashion to certain normative necessities that emerge from historical-societal learning processes and that can be argued for substantively. The idea of limits to the exploitation of nature represents one such learning process. It is in the sense of ‘speaking for society’ that Jonas may be regarded as a theorist of macro or collective rationality.

Apel’s account of responsibility has certain affinities with those of Caney and Jonas. Like Caney, he is mindful of the necessity of individual freedom as a foundation of individual responsibility, but thinks that individual responsibility can only be properly formed through appropriately organized dialogical relations with others. And, through this process, it also becomes a shared responsibility expressed in the necessity of generating right norms, that is to say, norms that have been formed through fully inclusive procedures. And, like Jonas, he acknowledges some substantive imperative emerging from the historical situation at which humanity has arrived, principally due to the over-development of technical rationality. But there is a tension in Apel’s account over exactly what value should be ascribed to procedure-independent perceptions like those of Jonas’s imperative of responsibility. It is evident that some type of avant-garde, substantive analysis has to be pre-procedurally formed and, realistically, also sustained in the continuing likelihood of conflict and dissensus.

Apel’s theory offers, nonetheless, an indispensable insight into how practical reason may come to terms with the challenges of macro-ethical, planetary, co-responsibility to address climate change. In emphasizing that democratic practical reason can only be communicative reason, he draws attention to the need for a world communication society to address global issues of responsibility and to build what he calls ‘justice solidarity’ on an equivalent scale. As a communication theory, his is a mediated theory that makes clear how macro and micro moments of ethical rationality have to become mutually accessible if the cognitive form of a global civil society that can reflect on its challenges is ever to be adequately established. As a mediated theory, it neither supposes that forms of individual rationality are naturalistically pre-decided, nor that macro-ethical principles should not be subject to democratic construction in society.

But neither should the theory start out from, as Apel does, with the assumption of the determination of social life ‘from behind’ by the existence of necessary presuppositions of communication. While he is on good ground to assume there are such presuppositions, the challenge of their translation into the cognitive forms of societal communication is bigger and more empirically contingent than is apparent from his account (O’Mahony, 2013). In fact, discourse ethics Part B is, in one variant or another, more like the normal case, and the full development of the theory of co-responsibility needs to be adjusted to a world characterized by dynamism, contingency, domination and fragmentation. In these circumstances, the logic of communicative reason needs to be carefully reconstructed as much from actual societal processes as from the telos of communicative action itself. To take an example already outlined in this volume by Shove et al., we need to theoretically comprehend the embedded logic of car usage practices in order to fully grasp how the cultural change wrought by communication on responsibility might gradually influence wide-ranging social change and, most essentially, democratic innovation. It is through such processes that we begin to understand the operation of co-responsibility in practice as a counterfactual complex of ideas that acquire traction in normative culture.

The indispensable insight that arises from Apel’s work on ecological and co-responsibility, anchored in the pragmatist epistemology that it is the gradual convergence of the perspectives of inquirers that makes knowledge possible, is the necessity of a future-oriented and democratic ethics. On the basis of such an ethics, only to be achieved by inclusive and fair communication, can contemporary problems like climate change lead to justice solidarity on a global scale. It may be possible to solve the challenge of climate change as a threat to planetary ecology by adding to the existing levels of global injustice and domination, and as Skillington’s account in this volume clearly illustrates, this can by no means be discounted as an emergent strategy. But, ultimately, this could only mean the end of democracy as a universalistic idea. Some contemporary social forces could countenance that possibility and some might even welcome it. These observations make it critical to empirically assess the balance of social forces in the world and above all the state of discursive and cultural structures and relations. Such a survey requires the theories and methodologies of social science to assess the prospects of a global communicative reason as co-responsibility. The pragmatist vision of philosophy, humanities, and social science that would speak to one another in forms of democratic inquiry that include publics, in this case global publics, has never been more needed. In all of this, the organization and discursive structuration of the supra-national public sphere will be pivotal to the prospects of co-responsibility and it is to this challenge the article now turns.

Climate change and the global public sphere

At the time of writing, September 2014, a UN-organized Global Summit on Climate Change is taking place in New York. In a Guardian article ‘Five ways Ban Ki-Moon’s summit has changed international climate politics forever’, Michael Jacobs lists various achievements of the summit (Jacobs, 2014). Along with tying in political leaders, gaining policy commitments, ensuring specific actions in certain fields, and recognition of the economic advantages of adapting to climate change, he notes as the fifth and most important achievement of all, ‘that the climate summit has re-energized the climate movement’. Similarly, in a chapter on climate ethics, Dale Jamieson argues that the ‘only way to break through on this problem, which is the world’s largest collective action problem, is through the actions of a morally motivated global citizens’ movement that acts as a highly committed political interest group’ (Jamieson, 2010).

Both these statements attest to the significance of socio-political mobilization on climate change. Mobilization is an index of deep-lying social perception of irresponsibility. But mobilization on a commensurate scale to the problem is only a first step. For the question that such mobilization poses is, what could be the structure-forming implications of its activities? The beginning of an answer to that question can be brought into play by looking at the work of philosophers like Young and May that explicitly seek to develop both a philosophical and social theoretical approach. to responsibility.

Young argues that responsibility is an appropriate theoretical concept to respond to the existence of injustice. Instead of asking what minimal duties should be fulfilled in line with an idea of responsibility limited to a strict principle of liability, she wishes to extend it beyond duty to a more wide-ranging category of obligation (Young, 2006). She uses the diagnostic tool of what she calls a ‘social connections’ approach, drawing on the social theory of institutions, to determine where responsibility should be located. Her working hypothesis, illustrated through cases such as the implications of sweatshop organization for consumer ethics, is that such an approach will reveal the existence of an interconnected and interdependent world in which responsibilities far transcend those that can be confined to the bounded territorial worlds of nation-states (Zhang, article in this volume). May, in a similar way, speaks about the intersubjective task of exploring what we can accept responsibility for, which he sees as linked to a feminist ethics of care, emphasizing that we should not turn away from those in need (May, 1992).

Social movements, as the avant-garde of general social mobilization, change perceptions of responsibility on a global level. They reach beyond existing compacts between responsibility and ideas of justice on global issues. They are often characterized by multiple, and often at least initially conflicting, elements, which may eventually unite over time behind a master frame. The critical complement to the call for responsibility in this sense is the construction of appropriate publics and, ultimately, collective action through institutions. For Young and May, responsibility responds to injustice and involves a call to establish radically altered relations of justice.

Some important elements of the call to responsibility in the previous sections fuse with this perspective. Accordingly, responsibility may be understood in two senses. First, it may be understood as a permanent, evolutionary-long, preparation for what can be termed, following Apel, justice solidarity. On any issue that could bear on justice, the first question involves clarifying the nature of the responsibility that specifies what should be done and who should do it, bearing in mind that this might be quite diffuse and wide-ranging and, above all, future oriented. But, second, responsibility in the contemporary period is doubly sharpened by both the powerful emergence of the issue of responsibility to nature, and by the additional challenges to realizing communicatively achieved co-responsibility on a global scale.

Writers such as Young and May, and also Adela Cortina who develops the ideas of Apel, want to change the liberal emphasis on the contract and break with the assumption that it is adequate to simply assert the legitimacy of formal rights grounded within established political communities (Cortina, 1990). For Cortina, rights emerge from values, and emotions shape the formation of values. This indicates that in pursuing the social grounding of co-responsibility, social inquiry must penetrate into deeper intercultural grounds that would begin by hard, reflexive questioning of the assumptions about internal and external democracy within the still dominant, if no longer hegemonic, western order. All of this indicates an attempt to shift the ground of dominant political cultural and anthropomorphic assumptions that remain entrenched as a kind of hardened political and ecological rationality that is, in Shove et al.’s sense, deeply embedded. Young’s idea of the exploration of social connections as a prelude to establishing new relations of responsibility is an attempt to unveil existing deficient relations of responsibility and justice viewed from an egalitarian cosmopolitan standpoint.

This process can also be sociologically observed as a process of global constitutionalization. Here, the idea of constitutionalization reaches much deeper than existing legal practices to the proper grounding of law in its moral and ethical foundations in which the centrality of responsibility becomes inescapable. Global constitutionalization should therefore be viewed as a communicative achievement in which complexes of emotions, values, and rights are pressed into new moulds against the backdrop of the necessity of co-responsibility on a scale far beyond what has historically been achieved. Right now, we may be in the midst of an experiment in what Brunkhorst understands as ‘revolutionary constitutionalization’, as the world struggles with the implications of emergent challenges that present themselves on a global scale (Brunkhorst, 2010).

For the above-mentioned writers, Young, May, and Cortina, the search for appropriate concepts of responsibility is therefore at the core of building a ‘sensorium’ to identify injustice and to prescribe how it might be put right. For this task, Cortina asserts the inhibiting effect of the western contract model to establish a global model of responsibility and justice, given its self-referential grounding of a ‘sense of justice’ within its own tradition, and its confinement of the good life to the control of individuals in their private life. We may thus anticipate that the contract model of climate change that is currently being pursued by international institutions cannot by itself deliver the needed impetus. Durkheim’s old question about what constitutes the non-contractual foundations of the contract once again asserts itself. And Cortina suggests that other philosophical and reasoning traditions suppressed by liberalism, and both western and non-western, such as the communitarian and dialogical, must be fully re-asserted as part of the underlying scaffolding of achieving discursive co-responsibility on a global stage. This insight retraces the logic of the first section of the article in the path from Caney to Apel.

The focus on the discourse of responsibility as a sensorium for injustice, including the fair addressing of climate change burdens, calls for a new kind of sociological inquiry. This inquiry, animated not just by the critical intentions of a negative ethics but also by the goal of realizing moral principles by means of a positive ethics (Larsen, 2009), would explore both what Young describes as social connections and also communicative rationality at a global level. In this way, the assertion of abstract normative imperatives would be tempered both by empirical-theoretical knowledge and by participatory social research in the tradition of Dewey (Bohman, 2010). Such sociological inquiry might address two questions. The first of which is, to what extent are the needed innovations already in train set against the acute challenge posed by global warming? And the second is to counterfactually anticipate what is required to achieve a more responsible world, in light of the preliminary answer to the first question and the processes already in train.

There are some indications that international social and political theory is beginning to undergo the necessary changes to enable it to address these two questions. Brunkhorst speaks of the growth of the idea of international society as distinct from international relations (Brunkhorst, 2010). Elsewhere, I have drawn attention to the contemporary weakening of the dominance of classical political science in scholarship of the European Union, partly as the societal stake of belonging to a transnational federation begins to become apparent for individuals, groups and countries (O’Mahony, 2012). In general, the absolute centrality of transnational processes today call for a new approach from the social sciences. The concept of society ineluctably extends beyond single states, and issues such as global warming carry this process forward with greater momentum.

Antje Wiener offers a valuable synthetic approach that illustrates how the new sociological approaches to international society may contribute to both understanding and observing progress towards co-responsibility for global warming (Wiener, 2007, 2010). While Wiener does not explicitly address the concept of co-responsibility, she explores, in a manner compatible with the concept, how norms emerge and become stabilized beyond the nation state, arguing for an approach that emphasizes the contestedness of norms (Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998). Drawing on Habermas’s exploration of the tension between facts and norms, she sees the validity basis of norms as being secured by means of a ‘logic of contestedness’. Observing this logic is more fundamental than merely factually observing the effects of norms. Such a logic of contestedness, taking place through processes of communication across multiple lifeworlds and institutional arenas, would, in Apel’s sense, properly be organized by discursive co-responsibility, but the empirical task is to observe the extent to which co-responsibility co-evolves with heightened ecological responsibility. Drawing upon another compatible concept, norms are triple contingently formed by the continuous presence of observing and communicating publics, not just by double contingent interaction between, for example, elite negotiators (Strydom, 1999). Both concepts, the logic of contestedness and triple contingency, can be operationalized through social research into the processes of communication, cognitive capacity building, and culture formation that bear on climate change. Appropriately methodologically specified, they can indicate to what extent the emerging global culture of climate change is characterized by agreement, reasonable disagreement, compromise, hegemony, or permanent conflict.

Such a research approach helps to clarify in what ways a responsible normative culture of climate change is forming within a global public sphere. Such a development forms an important part of the cosmopolitan public sphere that has rapidly consolidated over the last few decades, even if remains far from adequate. This may be seen as both a global phenomenon per se and also as a macro-regional phenomenon with global implications. Though the emergence of critical, responsibility-demanding publics in public spheres with appropriate levels of institutional influence is a sine qua non to build a normative culture adequate to the challenge of climate change, it cannot be supposed that the mere emergence of a global public sphere is by itself sufficient. For public discourse can be as much a place for misinformation, ideologically projected false dawns, and domination as for normative progress (Honneth, 2011; O’Mahony, 2013). And without knowing its deep cultural foundations, revealed through appropriate social research, it is hard to know what is emerging and what is possible.

Global warming and responsibility: towards a communicative approach

For the task of fully explicating the phenomenon of a global public sphere on climate change and other issues, the normative approach pioneered by Wiener and others is not by itself adequate, even it points in the right direction. For almost a half century now, a cognitive-communicative turn has become noticeable in significant areas of social science. This is now penetrating rapidly into the theory of international society. After its initial consolidation in the 1960s, building on earlier traditions, the various strands of the cognitive-communicative turn extensively criticized the normative sociology that had reached its peak of influence in structural-functional hegemony. For a time, the very concept of norm began to recede in the social sciences as the revisable, relativist, relational and reflexive qualities of rule systems, viewed from a communicative standpoint, became ever more emphasized. But the concept of norm remains intrinsic to understanding a core dimension of social life, generalized orientations to innovative or reproductive action, and is now enjoying a tentative renaissance as is illustrated by the manner in which Wiener and others link it closely to the communicative turn while retaining its conceptual centrality.

Viewed from the standpoint of a communicative account of normativity, such as that offered by Wiener, norms are the expression of cultural structures, whereas the communicative process has more or less the quality of an unstructured process that generates and reproduces these norms. Of course, the concept of social structure or collective actor is used, implicitly or explicitly, to show how communication is socially organized with respect to its production, distribution, and reception, and this overlaps with the structural account of the public sphere emanating from Habermas (Habermas, 1989). But what is not developed is an account of the actual structure of communication, which takes the form of those collective capacities that have become recognized modalities of communication. These collective capacities can be described as the cognitive order, drawing on the idea of a mind of society (Eder, 2007; O’Mahony, 2013; Strydom, 2011;). Viewed politically, such cognitive capacities are modalities of argumentation, e.g., justice, legality, control, dignity, responsibility, etc, that enable collectives to make sense of political questions from quite different perspectives. Using another extensively used term, they reflect the establishment of master frames over time without which political discourse would have no orientation, no capacity for collective sense-making (Benford, 2013; O’Mahony and Delanty, 2001).

These cognitive modalities are in another sense also normatively structured. They are patterned on the historically evolved normative culture of modernity, but they are not the same as it. They are, rather, as put by Klaus Eder, the kind of communicative rule systems that become engaged when normative rules break down or are inadequate (Eder, 2007). Yet, though cognitive rule systems always underpin normative rule systems, their full significance only becomes apparent when, consistent with Wiener’s account, normative rules are contested (Wiener, 2010). Cognitive rule systems then emerge as the necessary resources in anticipating how to go on communicating, where no clear normative rule systems underpin the communication. These cognitive rule systems therefore contain a surplus of meaning that lies latent in their make-up – which is usually first taken up by an avant-garde. These latent capacities, when made socially manifest, first of all make possible communicatively driven collective learning and then, second, in propitious circumstances, normative innovation. And it is possible to show, though for space reasons it cannot be done here, how historically such communicatively driven collective learning and normative innovation has actually taken place, while also noting that such processes as often end up in regressive as ‘progressive’ outcomes (Eder, 1985).

Viewing the cognitive order as basic to cultural structure means that culture can be viewed as having not only semantic foundations, as is a dominant assumption in sociology – for example, the theoretical account of social imaginaries – but also, in accord with the intersubjective theory of the lifeworld, compatible cogntive-pragmatic foundations. Such a cogntive-pragmatic account reveals the communicative capacities on which semantics are formed within given universes of meaning. Intersubjective cogntive-pragmatic capacities therefore can either sustain or reach beyond existing semantics, showing, in the latter instance, what can be counterfactually anticipated and argued for. Such a process of ‘going beyond’ is normally carried by a negative ethics of critique of many possible kinds, as emphasized by Brunkhorst, but it can also be transformed into the positive ethics of a future regime of justice. The point here is not to argue for a cogntive-pragmatic approach over a semantic one; both are reciprocally implicated in sustaining and transforming normative orders. It is rather to emphasize that the existence of collective cogntive-pragmatic capacities is fundamental to generating semantic innovation.

The cognitive and symbolic structuring of culture, and its relationship to discursive, deliberative, and other norm-setting processes, entail complex theoretical explication. For the present, I can only identify one pivotal dimension of this process relevant to the current article. Earlier, I developed some basic insights into the substantive theory of ecological responsibility developed by Jonas’s and Apel’s discourse ethical and procedural theory of co-responsibility, suggesting there was an intrinsic but as yet not properly explicated link between them. That link arises negatively in the continuation of crisis and contradiction. It arises positively through the construction of a macro-cultural ethic of ecological responsibility and its combination with an appropriate democratic structure for realizing discursive co-responsibility. The establishment of an adequate structure of discursive co-responsibility would be intrinsic to initially establishing and then continuing to realize such an ecological macro-ethic, along with aligning it on an ongoing basis with wider cultural and institutional complexes.

A disciplinary shift from the work of Jonas and Apel – that is in fact rather more a type of extended cooperation – has to be undertaken from philosophy to sociology in order to properly understand how a double structure of responsibility of both a substantive (ecologically responsible) and procedural (co-responsible) kind could be actually established. This is needed because it not possible to anticipate a world, given current actualities, in which full discursive co-responsibility can be realized. Apel himself acknowledges this in his account of discourse ethics, where Part B based on the ‘reality principle’ supplements Part A, the ideal order of discourse (Apel, 1993b). But this is a limited reading and without a sociological description of complex mediation processes tends to fall between the two stools of the hegemony of strategic-rational realism or discursive idealism. This is not to decry these thought experiments, but to suggest they are in need of sociological elaboration. For what is needed is careful reconstruction of the actual demonstrated or potential capacities of society to bring about the needed mediation of substantive and procedural dimensions of responsibility (O’Mahony, 2013).

Young’s proposal for a social connections approach to grasping existing interdependencies offers part of the solution in that the reconstructive potential of societal analysis must be based on an explanatory theory of this kind (Young, 2006). But such an approach must be supplemented by a cultural-communicative account of how groups make sense of these interdependencies or, indeed, how through such sense-making practices create and continue them. The latter must also be seen as both a structured and dynamic process of cultural-communicative world creation that is at the core of the potential for political coordination of global warming. But the societal task, viewed from the cultural-communication standpoint outlined above, is quite a demanding one. Instead of a philosophical argument for the normative necessity of the double imperative of responsibility, what has to be demonstrated is how it might already be happening, how it might go further, and what might be the obstacles that inhibit this process.

At the core of any such inquiry are reconstructive cognitive and normative standards. Much attention has been given to the technical normative standards entailed in measures to improve adaptation to and mitigation of global warming. In other words, measures that can find their way into international and domestic law and that follow from scientifically advanced standards for not exacerbating global warming further. But it does not take much reflection to problematize this standard on normative grounds. Many questions quickly emerge, such as how can meaningful standards be agreed and enforced? How can the multiple effects of climate change be assessed and fairly remedied? How can climate justice for the worst affected parties be separated from other problems such as chronic poverty in the South? How can the ecological re-engineering of world societies that consume ever more carbon resources be rapidly brought about? This is just a starting list of questions and it can readily be seen that a level of normative innovation that could address these questions is indeed far away, for example, the full specification of a human rights regime to which the technical norms should be answerable.

But if a cognitive-communicative standard underpinning co-responsibility is also advanced, the challenge of specifying adequate normative rules seems less daunting. The cognitive standard would amount to the common establishment of ‘presuppositional rules’ about what constitutes moral responsibility in the face of global warming. Such rules would at least partly precede normative innovation. They reflect a situation when global publics eventually come to acquire the cognitive resources to understand the dynamics of climate change, how to generate an adequate discourse on it and, on this basis, clarify what could be done about it. If this discourse were indeed to be adequate, the diffusion of a responsibility ethic would need to be articulated to shape the direction of normative innovation. For this purpose, profit may be taken from episodes of transformative social change involving public formation that have given rise to democracy, welfarism, feminism and revolutionary upheaval in former communist countries, to name but a few examples.

Returning to the observations made by Jacobs and Jamieson referenced above, social change on this scale is carried first by a movement that develops and diffuses arguments for the needed changes. It proceeds by a complex, inter-discursive process of conflict-ridden communication before, in those cases where it survives, achieving a certain bridgehead in public opinion. Viewed thus, the discourse of climate change, with the wider imperative of ecological responsibility inextricably built into it, needs to make substantial inroads into global public opinion, if it is to form presuppositional cognitive rule system that would be a prelude to radical normative innovation. Radical normative innovation will not precede the cognitive change but will instead follow it, and cognitive change will be as much or more animated by a critique of the absence, insufficiency, or direction of normative innovation as building on normative achievements. It is in this sense that the imperative of cultural innovation, rather than technical management alone, was stressed at the outset.

Apel’s idea of co-responsibility may be understood as operating on both a cognitive processual and normative-procedural levels. At the cognitive processual level, co-responsibility operates as the requirement to build a discursive order sufficient to embed ideas of ecological responsibility in publics. The contemporary global public sphere struggles to create such public knowledge and commitments, though it is not entirely without success. More radical interventions are needed to create such global conditions of discursive co-responsibility that would bring about the needed cognitive re-orientation. It can only take place by means of building an intercultural cosmopolitan understanding on the basis of adequate means of communication and of socialization. And this is a task that is proving profoundly difficult even as it becomes all the more necessary.

This task is harder without compatible innovation on the normative level. The continuing excessive power of national interest operating on the global stage, hearkening back to the old realist mode of coordinating international relations, has inhibited the UN from adequately playing this role, though climate change is one of those examples that indicates a possible change of its role. A global public sphere, and within it the idea of ecological responsibility, can only properly operate when a constitutional order of global governance will be in place. As can be inferred from Zhang’s article in this volume, such a constitutional order may have significant effects even for non-democratic countries. From the standpoint of an emergent order of discursive co-responsibility, the constitutional rules that underpin global governance will have to be forged rather more quickly than those that accompanied the centuries-long project of constitutionalization within nation states. The status of moral rules, such as the vindication of basic human rights in all countries, may be hard to fully redeem at an early stage of such a process, but a project of cosmopolitan global democratization will necessarily be a long project – though it cannot be too long or it will be too late – and the point is to properly begin before it is indeed too late (Brunkhorst, 2005).

Hence, climate change will be bound up with the innovation capacities of global civil society to establish reinforcing cognitive and normative projects of responsibility. The establishment of a global responsibility ethic asks for much in the way of cultural and institutional change. This is why climate change has a compelling force. To address the dangers that it has created requires not just some bargaining between globally operating politicians but the creation of an order of cosmopolitan co-responsibility that would be equivalent to building democracy itself, though it would have to happen in a much shorter timeframe.