Climate Change and Anti-Meaning

Abstract

In this paper, we propose meaningfulness as one important evaluative criterion in individual climate ethics and suggest that most of our greenhouse gas emitting actions, behaviours, and lives are the opposite of meaningful: anti-meaningful. We explain why such actions etc. score negatively on three important dimensions of the meaningfulness scale, which we call the agential, narrative, and generative dimensions. We suggest that thinking about individual climate ethics also in terms of (anti-) meaningfulness illuminates important aspects of our troubled ethical involvement with CC and can make a fresh and fruitful contribution to existing discussions, which tend to focus on moral responsibility and obligations.

Virtue, Environmental Ethics, Nonhuman Values, and Anthropocentrism

“…Ideally, such experiments should be capable of prompting systemic reform if adequately scaled up, and interpersonal coordination upon them should be as easy as possible to achieve [90]. Individuating and even inventing these experiments in living, personally engaging in them, and promoting and sustaining coordination upon them is one way to retrieve one's agency in the face of CC and possibly also find new sources of meaning in one's life amidst planetary changes (for more on CC and meaning in life, see [117]).…”