215 - As Phil Cafaro notes, institutions can also make us greedy or apathetic. For instance, abstract democracies where sound-bytes rule and people do little more than vote make us apathetic in many respects. Accountability mechanisms that tie promotion and bonuses to quarterly returns make us squeeze the present at the expense of the future. Look at the decision-making that led to the B.P. oil spill. So these institutions breed greed -taking more than is prudent or fair. There are many kinds of institutions from the standpoint of those that hinder responsible environmental behavior. A good taxonomy of them would be helpful.
216 - A taxonomy of institutions that are helpful for responsible environmental behavior would also be useful. How many different kinds are there currently in, say, mainstream U.S. society? By pointing to kinds of institutions, too, we would avoid the problem of listing regulatory bodies. The question is how rich a fabric of institutions we have across the many levels and sectors of society. So, in addition to federal regulatory bodies like the E.P.A., we can acknowledge educational programs -say, in the Park Service or in schools. But what else? And what about institutions that are indirectly helpful, which aren't intended to produce responsibility for the environment but which nevertheless do?
217 - At a theoretical level, one of the concepts that remains unclear (to me, at least) is a concept of how an institution *shapes* character. I would guess that there are many ways -e.g., incentives, which may make it profitable to pollute; deterrents, which may make it too painful to challenge a government's (China's) environmental injustices; limits, which may make it hard for your typical worker to have time to read up on environmental problems, if they cross his mind; and so on. But even these indications have substantial opaqueness within them. What is it about a limit that is reasonable? For instance, we should not accept the limitations of work tasks as sufficient excuses for failing to stop a murder on the street outside one's office building simply by calling the police. But it seems reasonable to accept that if I have a zillion things to do in one day, I might be excused from reading the latest E.P.A. report on toxicity in my city. Is it, though? Are these so-called limits just masks for values that we do not want to squarely face, e.g. that toxic slow death -we assume- is not nearly as bad as murder? And yet that seems hardly justifiable. Toxic slow death might not be intentionally caused, but it's still very, very bad -especially when it's a kid who gets the cancer.
218 - At the core of the problem about institutions and when they provide an excuse for thoughtless behavior is the notion of reasonable conscientious effort. Only when people have been reasonably thoughtful and yet still unintentionally produced thoughtless results might we look at the institution as a limit, producer, or enabling condition of thoughtlessness. The manager who tried his best to fulfill his work, enjoy his family and be a good citizen, yet who simply didn't have time in his day to track down all the environmental impact reports that the organization didn't have a system to get to him is not to blame for unintentionally promoting bad environmental actions by the corporation. The C.E.O. who became aware of environmental impacts and did not form a system within his organization to process and distribute them, a system with teeth that backed them up and demanded taking them as salient -he is.
219 - Everything has its system. And what's ours? We design products to be thrown away when they break or are superseded by some other more efficient version of them. We ignore renewable energy and use our nest-egg resources, like coal and oil. There's a massive impatience to all this, like a fed-up person grabbing for satisfaction that can be forced out without too much thought, balance, reticence, or art. Now, now. "And forget the problems later; I don't have time for them."
220 - Reading up on how common household items abrade carcinogenic particles, or particles bad for the lungs, or otherwise toxic things; reading how common household items off-gas poisonous gases, or those which produce allergies, asthma or other nasty things -- this is a sobering thing to do. And when I realize that parts are outsourced from parts of the world where little limitation is placed on what goes into a product ... then I really start to wonder about the impatience of our production. We don't take the elementary time across decades to see whether our experiments unintentionally harm. The budget sensitive manager doesn't care what they do in X-part-of-the-world so long as the part is cheap. And the regulators back home don't have time to check the offshore parts coming in.
221 - I feel that not enough attention is given in philosophy to friendship circles, or friendship branches (branching off interlinkings of friends of friends of ...). Philosophers focus on friendship between two as -since Aristotle- an aspect of human flourishing. But political philosophers jump from the individual to the macro-scale of the societal without considering the level of friends and of how friends organize, informally, within themselves and branching off, social change. Environmentalists, too, have this vice. There are the hermits -the Thoreaus- and then there are the activists -the Carsons- militating for society-wide transformation, usually regulatory in some form. In between, however, are linkages of friends who influence each other and who -can- pass along environmental wisdom and experimentation. This is soft social change, quiet and effective in its own way.
