Speakers: Kyle Fruh (Duke Kunshan University), Emily McWilliams (Duke Kunshan University)

Moderator: Teng Fei (Renmin University of China)

Time: May 10, 2024, 15:00 - 17:00

Venue: Lecture Hall, Institute of Philosophy, Chinese Academy of Sciences (4th Floor, South Building, Building 4, Software Park, No. 4 Zhongguancun South Street, Haidian District, Beijing)

Organizer: Institute of Philosophy, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Abstract：We articulate and explore a tension in our epistemic and moral responsibilities in the face of climate change. The emotions of hope and despair play important roles in this tension. We assume that there are general moral obligations to engage with the climate crisis by remaining active and participatory in addressing it. This requires epistemic and practical engagement: we have a moral responsibility to be good inquirers, so that we understand the current situation, and how to best respond to it. But as we make good on these epistemic obligations by learning more about the present and impending realities of climate change, our inquiries may tend to nourish despair rather than hope. And despair over the reality that our actions would be unable or unlikely to make a difference in averting the climate crisis threatens our sense of agency, making us less likely to engage. Given this tension, we are caught between the obligation to pursue epistemic goods like understanding, and the obligation to be active participants in climate action. The despair created by the first activity tends to undermine a necessary condition for the second one, since through defeating hope, it undercuts agency. 

We develop this problem by explaining the importance of hope in recent work on climate change, highlighting the dire state of the climate crisis as a ground for despair, and elaborating how this combination creates a tension between our moral and epistemic responsibilities. We then address two strategies that would generate a response to the problem, one that rejects epistemic responsibilities, and another that rejects despair as unwarranted. We argue that both strategies are unsuccessful. Finally, we argue that a key distinction between despair and hopelessness illuminates a relationship between hope and despair that is more complex than has been acknowledged, such that it’s possible to both hope and despair without the latter necessarily constituting a serious threat to agency.  

Speaker Bio：Kyle Fruh is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Duke Kunshan University. He has written on a number of areas in ethics, including the ethical implications of climate change, the nature of promissory obligation, and moral heroism. His book, Moral Heroism without Virtue, is expected to be published in 2025 (Cambridge University Press).

Emily McWilliams is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Duke Kunshan University, where she teaches courses in philosophy and ethics & leadership. Her research is mainly in epistemology. She works on questions about epistemic normativity, the epistemic and moral norms of collective inquiry, epistemic injustice, and other issues in applied feminist epistemology.

Commentator Bio：Teng Fei is currently a lecturer in the School of Philosophy at Renmin University of China. Her research interests include environmental philosophy, ethics of science and technology and Confucianism. She obtained her PhD from Utrecht University, The Netherlands. She was a visiting scholar of Université Catholique de Louvain 

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