Introduction
The climate crisis is incredibly daunting. It is driven by an unsustainable international system for energy production. It indicts the fundamental organizing principles of the global economy. As Costa Samaras put it, climate change is the landscape on which our future unfolds. How do individuals begin to meet such a challenge?
Like other daunting challenges, such as racism, it is common to diagnose climate change as a “structural” problem. Its causes are thought to emerge from our collective activity, and crucially involve supra-individual factors like our laws, economies, cultural power dynamics, history, norms, and the built environment—roads, grids, buildings, gas stoves, and energy extraction infrastructures—that these activities have created and sustained. When understood this way, a natural next thought is that to tackle structural problems, we need, as Senator Elizabeth Warren says, “big structural change.”
Big structural change is often contrasted with things we can do as individuals, such as adopting new eating habits, recycling, and making “greener” consumer decisions. Given the depth and breadth of the climate crisis, an increasingly widely shared opinion is that it is better to try to change structures than it is to change individuals.
In a forthcoming article in Environmental Communication, whose main lines of thought we are expanding in a book to be published by The MIT Press, we argue that while structural change is absolutely essential, it is a mistake to conceive of individual and structural change as mutually-exclusive alternatives. Rather, we develop a range of arguments and examples showing how they are mutually-supporting complements. We argue for moving beyond oppositional thinking about structural change and individual action, offering in its place a picture of structural change and individual action as symbiotic. On this view, the most important individual actions are those that facilitate structural change, and the most important structural changes are those that reshape the ways individuals think, feel, and act toward one another and their shared world.
We’ll focus on climate change here, but the book will apply this perspective to a wider range of cases, including racial injustice and political misinformation.
Background
Consider the throughline between this diverse range of thinkers:
“If there are people who feel that God wants them to change the structures of society, that is something between them and their God. . . . I am called to help the individual; to love each poor person. Not to deal with institutions.” –Mother Teresa
“There is no social-change fairy. There is only change made by the hands of individuals.” –Winona LaDuke
“They are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour… the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.” –Margaret Thatcher
“Nothing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it happens first in the images in our heads.” –Gloria Anzaldúa
Despite the many differences between these thinkers, their individualistic statements emphasize the importance of personal responsibility and self-transformation. Some portray abstract talk of changing “structures” or “society” as secondary in priority while others portray it as a counterproductive distraction from the hard and necessary work of changing personal habits, hearts, and minds. Individualism of this sort has a long and fascinating history in scholarship and activism about social change across an array of social and political perspectives, ranging from the temperance movement to early environmentalist campaigns.
For example, posters like this suggest that the only way to protect the planet is for each person to do their part to be less wasteful and to clean up after themselves.
Some philosophers have written about climate change in this individualist vein by considering the responsibilities each of us has to reduce our “personal” emissions (e.g., Sinnott-Armstrong 2005; Hourdequin 2010; Broome forthcoming). Others have examined environmental morality through the lens of individual virtues and vices: Jamieson (2007) argues that people should cultivate virtues like humility, mindfulness, and temperance in the era of anthropogenic climate change, while Hourdequin (2010) raises moral issues related to hypocrisy by considering whether it is possible for a person who drives an inefficient car for pleasure to be genuinely concerned about climate change.
Increasingly, however, the ethos of the climate movement is “structuralism” about social change, and from that perspective, the focus on individual action is the real distraction. It draws attention away from the “deep” sources of social problems, which are rooted in laws, corporate practices, ideologies, and social inequalities. “Structural problems require structural solutions” is an increasingly common view, or as Ezra Klein and Zeynep Tufekci put it, serious strategizing about climate action requires “thinking in systems.” Viral headlines and memes written from this perspective typically portray individual and structural solutions as oppositional as well:
Memes like these have also gone viral:
Structuralists argue that we should focus less on changing hearts and minds and more on passing new laws and public policies, creating international agreements and technologies, and reshaping the “rules of the road” that govern individual agency (as the influential economist Douglas North put it). Research commonly construed as “structuralist” abstracts away from individuals, or holds individual-difference variables constant, to focus on identifying drivers of climate-related outcomes exogenous to individuals. These include government type (Harrison & Sundstrom 2007), industrial arrangements (Mildenberger 2020), policy design and costs (Bechtel & Scheve 2013), regional wealth (Franzen & Vogl 2013), cues from political elites (Gustafson et al. 2019), media tropes (e.g., tropes about national identity; Olausson 2010; Post et al. 2019), and “the structural power of business interests” to dominate media coverage and public debate about the climate (Wetts 2020; see also Wetts 2019). To this last point: some invocations of structuralism include explicit dismissals of the individualist ethos, by, for example, pointing out that concepts like “litterbug” and “personal carbon footprint”—as deployed in books like The Climate Diet: 50 Ways to Trim Your Carbon Footprint (Greenberg 2021)—were created by industrial polluters to deflect attention and responsibility from themselves.
From Oppositional to Symbiotic Thinking
We wholeheartedly agree about the need for structural change. But the framing of this conversation—which has members of academia, activist circles, and the larger public debating “changing individuals” versus “changing structures”—is misleading and counterproductive. And while it is easy to pay lip service to the idea that “of course, it’s not one or the other—it’s both” (as we sometimes hear when giving talks about this topic), a clearer, better articulated, and empirically informed account of how to integrate both approaches is urgently needed.
We continue that work in more detail in the paper and book. In the table below, we briefly describe several common individualist and structuralist talking points, as well as the gist of symbiotic alternatives to them. Our broad concern is that, too often, the things we can do easily as individuals—choosing to fly less often or to eat less meat—seem doable but ineffective, while the “important” things that need doing—creating “structural reform” or “changing the system”—can seem vague, unachievable, or overwhelming. We worry this creates a motivational morass, a deflating sense that what one can do doesn’t matter and that what matters isn’t doable. To forestall what might be a gathering sense of frustration and helplessness, we argue that it is crucial that people are able to see themselves as part of and crucial to structural change. We continue articulating our view of individuals and structures as deeply interwoven so that others might better share that vision, and we might all more effectively act on it.
A final thought: one way philosophers in particular might see ourselves as contributing to structural change is for us to take advantage of the roles we play within the academic institutions we inhabit. For example, we can organize and support carbon-neutral conferences and lobby the APA to move one of the three annual divisional meetings online. (Here’s a petition for the APA 2+1 Campaign.) Some of the most important work we can do is incorporate climate change into our teaching, but more than that, we can teach our students about structurally-oriented actions that address the climate crisis and related challenges. For inspiring work in this area, see Ramona Ilea, Susan Hawthorne, and Monica Janzen’s presentation, “Engaged Philosophy: Switching ‘On’ Student Power” (as well as their Engaged Philosophy website), which outlines, among other things, how to build a syllabus incorporating a series of small activities that culminate in a broader civic engagement project. Philosophers for Sustainability has also created a useful list of further resources for these and other similarly structurally-oriented actions.
Of course, we are not suggesting that any of these actions alone will “solve” climate change, and we don’t take any of them to be aimed at “fundamental” levers of social change. But that’s because we don’t think any of the many levers of social change should be thought of as fundamental. Social change is enormously complex, with a multitude of individuals and social forces mutually affecting each other in a myriad of overlapping ways. There are many ways for us to try to understand, prod, and harness these forces and interactions, and more than a handful of them are worthy of our attention and effort.
| Topic | Structuralist Claim | Individualist Claim | Interdependence |
| Causal Insignificance | Individual consumer choices cannot make a material difference to atmospheric GHG concentrations. Skipping a flight or buying a carbon offset is not even a “drop in the bucket.” Only changes to “hard” structures such as laws and material infrastructures can have the requisite causal impacts to decarbonize the planet. | It is precisely the “hardness” of entrenched structures that makes efforts to change them—to “change the system”—causally insignificant. In the face of immovable structures, it’s rational for individuals to do what they can, e.g., by changing their consumption habits. | Structural reforms causally depend on individual changes, and vice versa. If consumption choices like recycling and switching to a plant-based diet are insignificant, there are other changes individuals can make to help transform climate-related social structures, such as calling one’s elected representatives and talking to one’s friends and family about the personal importance of climate change to you. The causal impacts of individual choices and structural reforms must be assessed empirically, including consideration of investments of effort against expected outcomes. |
| Breadth, Depth, Durability | Rather than focus on idiosyncratic issues (e.g., meat consumption), “deeper” and lasting change is needed which addresses the “root” or “underlying” causes of the climate crisis (e.g., economies reliant on fossil fuel extraction and political ideologies such as “neoliberalism”). | Change occurs when individuals are persuaded to make different choices (cf., declines in smoking and drunk driving in the United States). | Deep and durable change is needed, but because of the potential for “failed success” of structural reform—i.e., changes that create backlash sufficient to undo them (e.g., Prohibition in the United States)—structural change must ensure popular support. |
| Victim Blaming | Ordinary people—especially the global poor—suffer the worst effects of climate change. Asking them to make sacrifices to reduce their carbon footprint unjustly puts the onus on the victims to solve a problem that they did not create. | All paths to decarbonization must include rapid and massive “demand-side” increases in consumer desire for low-carbon products (e.g., electric cars and electrification of home heating). | Holding individuals responsible for helping to solve collective problems need not entail blaming them (Anderson 2010; Zheng 2018). Individuals have responsibilities to others given their distinctive social roles (e.g., citizens must vote, businessowners must decarbonize their production chains). |
| Distraction | Preoccupation with individual (consumer) choice distracts from more effective activities like climate activism (Frank 2020). “Greenwashing” has been effective for diverting attention from corporate malfeasance to consumer-based “green” identity signaling (Oreskes & Conway 2010). | “Green” consumer behavior is not sufficient to solve the climate crisis, but purchasing low-carbon products is virtuous, beneficial, and ultimately necessary for decarbonization. | The crucial empirical question is in when “green” consumer behavior complements or substitutes for structurally-oriented behavior. Identity and consistency effects may drive “green consumers” to be more rather than less likely to engage in climate activism. |
| Meta-Structuralist Belief | Belief systems are consequences of structural phenomena. People subscribe to individualist, consumerist worldviews because they live in societies organized around individual liberty, and the pursuit of personal wealth and happiness. Inequality increases people’s beliefs in individual responsibility for one’s fate (García-Sánchez et al. 2019). Changing widely-held beliefs requires changing structures. | Culture is the product of individuals’ choices and values. Structural phenomena like inequality are the product of widely-held meritocratic beliefs. | Widely held beliefs both cause and are caused by structural phenomena. For example, CO2 removal technologies like carbon capture and storage are likely necessary for reaching global net-zero emissions. Public support for CO2 removal technologies is weak in part because they are seen as “too slow” and as failings to address “root causes.” (Cox et al. 2020) |
| Corporate and State Responsibility | 100 companies are responsible for producing 70% of global GHGs since 1988 (Griffin 2017). The worst offenders have known for decades that their product would create the climate crisis; their response was to fund misinformation campaigns about climate science (Oreskes & Conway 2010). They must be held accountable by legislative enaction of pro-climate laws and policy. | Corporations and governments are run by individuals, who must be persuaded to enact climate friendly structural changes. Some of those 100 companies that are responsible for 70% of global GHG emissions are state-owned, and thus subject to public oversight. | Corporate and government behavior is constrained by “hard” structures, such as law and public policy, as well as “soft” structures, such as social norms. Changing corporate and state behavior requires changing these hard and soft structures of incentives and constraints, which requires, in turn, action by other institutionally-empowered individuals (e.g., media elites, “social referents,” community leaders, norm entrepreneurs, and the ordinary people who must organize to hold empowered individuals accountable (Raymond et al. 2013; Raymond 2016)). |
Michael Brownstein
Michael Brownstein is Associate Professor of Philosophy at John Jay College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. His research focuses on the intersection of science, ethics, and social change.
Daniel Kelly
Daniel Kellyis Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University. He focuses on issues at the intersection of philosophy of mind, cognitive science, moral theory, and evolution. He is a member of the Moral Psychology Research Group, the CES’s Evolutionary Approaches to Sustainability Working Group and Purdue’s Building Sustainable Communities Group.
Alex Madva
Alex Madva is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the California Center for Ethics and Policy at Cal Poly Pomona. His work explores how developments in the social sciences inform philosophy of mind, race, and feminism, and applied questions related to discrimination, implicit bias, segregation, and intergroup cooperation.
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