Slow, diffuse causal chains obscure personal responsibility for environmental harm

Evidence

Moral control comes into play when people acknowledge that they are contributing to harmful outcomes. When they shift the responsibility for the harm they cause to others or to external factors, they spare themselves self-reproach. It is easy to discern personal causation when one’s actions produce highly noticeable, local effects in the short term. It is difficult to do so when the relationship between action and outcome is too slow to be noticeable and is obscured by intertwined chains of causation that take a long time to produce widespread observable effects. As a result, either individuals see no relationship between what they do and its effect on the earth’s environment, or they view their contribution as too infinitesimal to make a difference in the global scheme of things. This sense of personal innocuousness is a form of self-exoneration for aggregate harm, but global effects are the cumulative products of just such local actions. The slogan “Think globally, act locally” is an effort to instill a sense of personal accountability for collective environmental harm. The belief that root causes can never be assigned because of the bewildering array of intertwined determinants is also self-exonerating. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2707 (#expands, via linked claim)

There is considerable agreement concerning the antecedent conditions that arenecessaryforpersonalguilttobeexperienced.Weiner(1995)arguesthat guilt is most likely to be experienced when the self is seen as responsible for a negative outcome. From an attribution perspective, guilt occurs when an internal attribution is made for a controllable negative outcome that results in harm to another. — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt, 144 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Guilt over consuming under globalization is diffused by unmappable causal chains — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 620; Environmental destruction stems from structural imbalance, not individual villainy — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 617; Climate responsibility belongs to impersonal structure, not any individual subject — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 138 (+13 more)

Broader Connections

• Slow, distributed environmental harms escape moral accountability because causation is invisible #expands (0.96) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2707
• Diffuse, indirect harm escapes personal moral control more easily #corroborates (0.92)
• Personal guilt arises from internal attributions for controllable harmful outcomes #complicates (0.72) — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt, 144