Penguins in Antarctica are adjusting their seasonal breeding practices at record rates for vertebrate animals. Three species of penguins (Adélie, Chinstrap, and Gentoo) have each adapted to fast-rising temperatures by moving up their breeding season by more than a week (nearly two weeks for the Gentoo penguins). Of course, such sudden adaptations are not ideal for those making them: All of the intricate patterns of prey movement, weather, landscape changes, predation threats, and competition that affect the penguin reproductive cycle ideally fit together, having evolved gradually over long periods of time, constantly adjusting to changes as they happen. Moreover, rapid adaptation to a changing climate tends to benefit generalists at the expense of more specialized species (in this case, the fish-eating Gentoo are expanding their range while the krill-specialist Adélie and Chinstrap penguins are facing challenging if variable conditions).
The point is not that penguin practices were once fixed and now they have to change. It’s that the rate of adaptation required is much higher than it has been. Changes wrought by human beings are orders of magnitude more rapid than those of the past, and the penguins are struggling to keep up. This year the Argentinian Esperanza station recorded the highest ever temperature for June: 15.4°C, more than 20 degrees above average for the Antarctic winter.
Life on earth has always been about adaptation. Human beings, too, have always had to adapt to changing conditions. We have sometimes made use of our capacity for deliberate coordination, and many of the conditions driving change have been of our own making. Both of these factors—anthropogenic changes driving our need to adapt and our capacity for deliberative cooperation—apply to the adaptation challenge that climate change presents to humankind. This challenge transcends mere climate adaptation in the sense of the counterpart to climate mitigation. Instead, human beings have to adapt to become able to take the kind of action that will allow continued flourishing; as the IPCC said of this general climate challenge, “history and psychology reveal that societies can thrive in these circumstances if they openly embrace uncertainty on the future and try out ways to improve life. Tolerating ambiguity can be learned, for example by interacting with history, poetry and the arts. Sometimes religion and philosophy also help.”
Throughout the past eleven thousand years or so of the Holocene geological era, human beings have enjoyed unusually stable climatic conditions. Now that we are living through the Anthropocene “event,” things are different. We human beings have made indelible changes to the geological record, and those changes reflect that fact that we now affect the potential flourishing of everything on the planet now and in the future. Here is the problem of the Anthropocene in a nutshell: Most planetary boundaries (conditions under which earth systems are likely sustainable) have been crossed already, and we are facing an increasing risk of losing the basic Holocene climatic stability that most of human civilization has enjoyed.
How can we employ our human capacity for deliberate coordination to respond to Anthropocene conditions? Traditionally, human beings have used concentration of power as a solution to coordination problems that would otherwise leave each of us in a state of nature, unable to achieve the basics of a flourishing life because we have no assurance of ongoing cooperation. Difficult as they have been to realize well, these social contract systems of coordination did not have to struggle with climatic instability, having enjoyed Holocene conditions of relative environmental predictability and, in particular, merely moderate resource scarcity. These underlying favorable conditions for reaching coordination have been taken for granted by most social contract theorists. For example, when scholars discuss David Hume’s famous identification of moderate scarcity and limited altruism as circumstances of justice, the contrast cases are normally abundance and generosity (because no system of distributive justice would be needed under circumstances of abundance and perfect altruism). But Anthropocene conditions force us to consider the opposite of abundance and altruism: general conditions of absolute scarcity driving inability to exhibit even limited altruism.
In a near-future broken world imagined by philosopher Tim Mulgan, survival bottlenecks make it impossible for people to satisfy even their basic needs without depriving others of the same satisfaction. Under possible post-Holocene climate instability, Humean circumstances of justice would not obtain. Already today, units of the remaining global carbon budget (that is, emissions under a cap likely to keep the rise in average global surface temperature below 2°C above preindustrial norms) are radically scarce, and they are being distributed more by assertion than agreement.
The coordination problems faced by Anthropocene human beings are radically more challenging than those faced by, say, seventeenth-century advocates of social contract theory. Those theories aimed to provide the conditions of productive cooperation by protecting people from unjust interference by other subjects, local leaders, or foreign foes. If we are to avoid a broken-world outcome in which the basic circumstances of justice no longer obtain, Anthropocene human beings will have to find a way to do much more than their seventeenth-century predecessors, resolving global collective action problems, constraining unprecedented concentrations of antisocial economic and political power, and shifting governance of the market and the rest of society to reflect real constraints across all the planetary boundaries. It is tempting to look beyond social contract theory for answers, given these challenging new imperatives.
On the one hand, one might say that social contract reasoning put us in this Anthropocene mess in the first place. After all, Lockean natural rights theory, with its model of natural resources flowing like a river and its counterfactual presumption of zero externalities for natural resource extraction, underlies the basic system of global capitalism driving unsustainable outcomes today. On the other hand, there are conceptual resources in the widely accepted folk theory of social contract that might provide us with means to deal with Anthropocene problems without starting from scratch or retreating to either utilitarianism or authoritarianism. A more Anthropocene-ready social contract theory could retain values like freedom and majority rule while rejecting their present misuse as defenders of the status quo, giving us the means to coordinate our way to a sustainable future.
In my view, Immanuel Kant’s mature cosmopolitan thought is a promising candidate for understanding and orienting us to our Anthropocene predicament. In his political essays and in The Metaphysics of Morals (1797), Kant reworks traditional social contract theory, engaging conventional topics like the legitimacy of property or the obligation to obey the state but revising them to reflect a recognition of exactly what later turned out to be significant about the Anthropocene: human agents’ unavoidable reciprocal effects on each other.
Kant’s social contract theory begins with the imperative to submit to rule of law administered by a state. Though he shares this starting point with the social contract tradition, he provides a novel basis for it that leads to new conclusions. For Kant, the only innate right is to freedom from determination by another’s will. As dwellers on the surface of a watery globe, Kant further insists, we cannot avoid affecting one another. From these two deeply un-Lockean ideas, it follows that the only way to avoid wronging each other all the time—by imposing unilateral determinations—would be for everyone to submit to what Kant calls omnilateral determination in the civil condition, that is, to the rule of law.
The problem with this set of ideas is not that they are implausible (on the contrary, Kant’s premises about freedom and the unavoidability of interaction resonate widely). The problem is that they are impossible to realize. Thanks to the imperfection of states, the incompleteness of their spheres of governance, and the impossibility of even identifying, much less governing all the other-affecting relations human beings have with one another, Kant’s idea of social contract must remain just that: an idea. However, we still can and ought to orient ourselves to this idea of rule-governed relation, treating everyone affected by our actions as justificatory equals as far as we can in the absence of perfect civil conditions.
Treating everyone as justificatory equals turns out to be a surprisingly apt rule for Anthropocene human beings. In 1784, Kant said that the “touchstone of whatever can be decided upon as law for a people lies in the question: whether a people could impose such a law upon itself.” In 2026, we are making decisions that affect every being on the spherical surface of the planet, now and in the future. For example, we might decide to emit greenhouse gases that (1) affect the climate and (2) limit the amount of greenhouse gases that others can safely emit. What would the Kantian touchstone tell us about the legitimacy of decisions to continue to increase our greenhouse gas emissions in a context of dwindling units of safe emissions? It is hard to imagine that present-day fellow earth-dwellers, many of whom rely on climate-impacted farming and fishing, and very few of whom are among the net beneficiaries of the fossil-fuel energy regime, would approve of the existing distribution of units of emissions.
It is even harder to imagine future inhabitants of Mulgan’s broken world retrospectively endorsing our allocation of scarce units of the global carbon sink to things like private jet flights and data centers when that allocation led them to a survival-bottleneck world in which the basic circumstances of justice were absent. Thinking about our present-day failure to respect planetary boundaries, Mulgan’s future broken-world philosopher speculates that we must have lacked the imaginative “resources to conceptualize the behavioural changes that would have been necessary to avoid disaster.” I hope that Mulgan’s broken-world philosopher is wrong about that. Far from lacking the conceptual resources to adapt to Anthropocene conditions, we have had them since the late eighteenth century.
Kant can help us diagnose Anthropocene wrongs. More than diagnosis, Kant provides a theory of how we can relate to one another and orient ourselves towards justice under radically imperfect conditions. We do not need to wait for global order or even for our state to do better to know that treating our fellow earth dwellers’ interests as negligible is wrong. Obeying existing imperfect climate law is a first step, but it does not exhaust our duties to affected others. Instead, we ought to express ourselves in the public sphere, organize civil society to make progress toward justice, and multiply plural spaces of behavior mediation to give ourselves more prospects for progress despite a lack of global assurance.
Thinking again of the need for human (and penguin!) adaptation to Anthropocene conditions can help reconcile us to the seemingly heroic demands of Kant’s thought. Like the penguins, we are suffering from evolutionary mismatch, evolved for worlds that are vanishing beneath our feet, adapted to solve problems that were orders of magnitude slower and simpler than those we have to face now. We should not be surprised when our friends and colleagues fail to engage with the realities of planetary boundaries, tipping points, or the latest models of global heating. None of us is naturally adapted to use systems theory, understand non-linear causality, or even to avoid everyday procrastination. The only way we can overcome our evolutionary inheritance of cognitive biases and wishful thinking is through commitment mechanisms; in other words, we need to employ our capacity for deliberative cooperation if we are to adapt to Anthropocene circumstances.
Kant’s dynamic theory envisions ongoing social and political adaptation, guided by the idea of social contract, flexibly responding to the challenges of the always imperfect world. We can and should use our capacity for deliberate coordination to adapt to Anthropocene conditions before it is too late for us, the penguins, and everything else.
Elisabeth Ellis
Elisabeth (Lisa) Ellis is a professor of philosophy at the University of Otago (Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka). Her research focuses on Kant's political philosophy and environmental political theory. Recent work includes “A Social Contract Case for a Carbon Tax: Ending Aviation Exceptionalism” (2024) and "Obligations across Time and Membership: Some Implications of Jakob Huber’s Retrieval of Kant’s Grounded Cosmopolitanism" (2025).
