Individual Responsibility for Environmental Degradation: The Moral and Practical Route to Change

In environmental ethics a debate has arisen over the extent to which the individual should make changes in personal lifestyle in a long-teim program of ameliorating environmental degradation, as opposed to directing energies toward public-policy change. In opposition are the facts that an individual's contribution to cm lronmcntal degradation can only have a negligible effect. Public policy offers the only real hope for such massive coordinated effort, and environmental degradation is only one of many global problems to which ethically oriented people must focus their attentions and energies. So far, the pro-personal responsibility side has urged that personal lifestyle changes are necessary for moral coherence, thus in turn for integrity of character, and lifestyle changes can affect others in a kind of chain reaction because humans are socially submerged beings. The stalemate here can only stymies the needed coordinated effort toward ameliorating environmental degradation. Further, moral concerns need to be brought into this issue; namely, the ramifications of pursuing a policy-only approach, emphasizing policy as the sole (or even primary means of ameliorating environmental degradation, implicitly undercuts the role of indiv idual agents in morality in general, in terms of (1) individual responsibility, (2) autonomy, and (3) creativity in soh mg problems. All these problems not only bear on the progiam to lev else cm environmental degradation, but undermine other widely held moral values Emphasizing peisonal lifestyle responsibility is not only the most moral alternate e but is also the most assured way to affect long-term changes and the better way to make policy changes credible and sufficiently substantive for change.