The Political Imaginary of Care: Generic versus Singular Futures
| Author | Christopher Groves |
| Published date | 01 October 2011 |
| Date | 01 October 2011 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.3366/jipt.2011.0013 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
THE POLITICAL IMAGINARY OF CARE: GENERIC
VERSUS SINGULAR FUTURES
CHRISTOPHER GROVES
Abstract: The impacts of the activities of technological societies extend further
into the future than their capacity to predict and control these impacts. Some
have argued that the repercussions of this deficiency of knowledge cause
fatal difficulties for both consequentialist and deontological accounts of future
oriented obligations. Increasingly, international politics encompasses issues
where this problem looms large: the connection between energy production
and consumption and climate change provides an excellent example. As the
reach of technologically-mediated social action increases, it is necessary to ask
whether a political imaginary that extends itself to match this reach requires
new concepts, and how far they should displace traditional political concepts of
obligation, based on reciprocity and harm avoidance. This paper draws on recent
scholarship on the role of concepts of care in political philosophy, bringing
together phenomenological and feminist concepts of care in contributing to a
positive concept of non-reciprocal intergenerational obligation that defends a
constitutive connection between care and justice.
Keywords: Attachment, care ethics, Hans Jonas, intergenerational justice,
responsibility, uncertainty
Introduction
The issues of how to determine what our responsibilities to future generations
are, and how these relate to the tools we possess for knowing about the future,
are increasingly the subject of international political debates. The emergence
of a variety of transboundary environmental risks, from acid rain to ozone
depletion, has led to this emerging focus, with the most obvious contemporary
Journal of International Political Theory, 7(2) 2011, 165–189
DOI: 10.3366/jipt.2011.0013
© Edinburgh University Press 2011
www.eupjournals.com/jipt
165
Christopher Groves
condensation point for these concerns being anthropogenic climate change
(ACC). Establishing international compacts to coordinate action on ACC has
made only slow progress. Many have seen the best hope for producing
such agreements as lying in unambiguous climatological evidence of rising
temperatures and the causal role of greenhouse gases (GHGs). Nonetheless,
predictions regarding future trends are hedged about with currently irresolvable
uncertainties, meaning that, rather than a single future trend being identified, a
set of future climate change scenarios exists.
The Stern Review, The Economics of Climate Change (published in 2006)
responded to these ambiguities with a case for action that employed the
methodology of neoclassical welfare economics, including integrated cost-
benefit analysis (hereafter CBA). The intention was to persuade political and
business interests of the urgent need for action by appealing to rational self-
interest. The cost of failing to reduce GHG emissions was estimated to be
between 5% and 20% of global GDP. By comparison, achieving a reduction of
GHG atmospheric concentrations to between 500 and 550ppm CO2equivalent
was assessed as costing about 1% of global GDP. The Review argued strongly
that this evidence placed a strong responsibility on governments now to take
committed collective action to mitigate GHG emissions and prepare for the
impacts of whatever climate change is produced by the GHGs already in the
atmosphere.
The problem of ACC is, like many other concerns regarding transboundary
environmental risks, one which involves both complex interactions between
social and natural systems, and significant temporal latency of effects. Some
have pointed to the deep penetration of advanced technologies into the everyday
life of contemporary societies as a major factor in the increasing number of
such risks (Beck 1992). But as ACC makes clear, the technical sophistication
of technologies is not itself enough to account for this increase. Technologies
may be crucial ingredients in creating such problems, but what makes some
dangerous and not others is whether or not their use triggers processes which
penetrate deeply and widely into natural structures and systems, and whether
or not these causal processes can easily be arrested or reversed by stopping or
reducing the use of the technology in question.
Where causal complexity and long-term latency exist, they surround action
in the present with uncertainties, undermining the reliability of scientific
knowledge (Nowotny 2003; Ravetz 2004; Wynne 1992). To achieve maximal
robustness, science relies on past observations to construct predictive theories
about the future. But as Baer and Spash (2008: 11) point out, ‘[h]uman induced
climate change holds the prospect of large-scale unique changes outside human
historical experience’. The future, as subject to such phenomena, cannot be
extrapolated from the past because there is no observation record with which
the expected events can be compared. In such circumstances, there opens up
166
To continue reading
Request your trial