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The will to believe and ... climate change


 I only recently encountered a brief discussion of the Jamesian will to believe in the context of climate change. 

It appears as a chapter in an anthology, Philosophical Tools for Climate Change (2024), prepared at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands. 

One odd feature of this book is that, although all the other chapters have an author credited by name on the table of contents, the will-to-believe chapter goes uncredited.  So I don't know to whom we owe it. 

The anonymous author chiefly wants us to recall James' point that some choices are forced.  They are (as we say in the 21st century) binary.  Either I act in a certain way or I don't. Either I attend my usual religion service this weekend or I don't.  There may be many reasons why I don't -- difficulty with transportation, loss of the underlying beliefs, conversion to a different set of beliefs and attendance at another service. Whatever.  But if someone is interested in whether I was in a certain place at a certain time hearing a certain sermon, the answer is "yes" or "no".  Forced choice.  No dialectical synthesis. 

Likewise, some choices are momentous.

To get back to climate change: suppose coordinated action is necessary to produce a certain consequence -- i.e. to get the human net output of carbon into the atmosphere below a desired level.  That is a forced choice. Either I join in that coordinated action or I do not. It may be the case that failing to assist can risk enormous negative consequences. That makes the matter momentous. Further, from the point of view of near and medium-term denizens of this planet, it will not really matter why I declined. To decline because I don't find the evidence sufficient, to decline because I believe it important to establish my right to decline dammit, to decline because that is the prompting of what I hear as the voice of God, to decline because I believe burning hydrocarbons is actually a good thing --- whatever. There is a forced choice: engage in the coordinated action or decline it. 

I commit no epistemological sin by opting for the "yes" even if the evidence is quite imperfect.   

I will likely have more to say about this in the new year. 

The picture above is the Groningen City Theatre. 

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Comments

  1. HenryDecember 26, 2025 at 6:08 AM

    An individual's failing to assist in fighting climate change will have virtually no measurable effect. It is only when many fail to assist that the matter becomes momentous. That's the tragedy of the commons.

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    Replies
    1. ChristopherDecember 30, 2025 at 12:19 AM

      The whole idea of a "tragedy of the commons" has come under some deserved academic fire of late. In fact, the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009 went to Elinor Ostrom for work on precisely this point. https://iea.org.uk/noble-prizing-winning-economists/elinor-ostrom/

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