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DevinMcDougallSecondPaper 12 - 18 Apr 2010 - Main.DevinMcDougall
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Climate Change and the Importance of Creeds-End Fit
 | | | It may seem a truism that good politics is not good policy. But one thing Arnold can teach us here is that since we are not all fully rational Thinking Persons, we are all prey to the allure of creeds. They are comforting because they simplify a complex and anxious modernity, and for that reason they are seductive. We do not always rationally select our political tactics to serve our policy goals. Creeds sometimes choose people, not the reverse. Once creeds gel into an organizational psychology, they become difficult to change, even in the face of persistent facts. | |
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< | However, like Fosdick, we can seek to leverage what agency we can muster to develop creeds that invoke, to borrow a phrase, "the better angels of our nature." Emphasizing an ethical frame that expresses its goal as seeking justice, rather than optimizing incentives, may not be good near-term politics but at least provides a means of motivating action when individual incentives run out. | >
> | However, like Fosdick, we can seek to leverage what partial agency we can muster to develop creeds that invoke, to borrow a phrase, "the better angels of our nature." Emphasizing an ethical frame that expresses its goal as seeking justice, rather than optimizing incentives, may not be good near-term politics but at least provides a means of motivating action when individual incentives run out. | | | According to contemporary economists, people do not act in ways that do not maximize their utility. But history offer examples of people who have dedicated themselves to working for justice. In American history, John Brown and Martin Luther King Jr. come to mind. Another interesting example is Richard Stallman, who has steadfastly resisted the replacement of the free software movement's justice creed with the incentives creed of open source. These types of examples, of humans struggling for justice rather than for their own gain, can serve as the basis of a justice-based creed to organize a climate movement. An incentives-based creed will not be to deal with the long, complex, and demanding task of supporting a global approach to climate change. |
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