The Climate Crisis

Care’s qualities are vitally needed to address the environmental and social crises we face. This chapter argues that neoliberalism has promoted a culture that attacks care, acting as a perverse organization to support the aims of a neoliberal global economy framed in an unsustainable way to exploit people and the planet. This culture’s role has been to deregulate people’s moral sense through encouraging them to turn a blind eye to their feelings of disquiet and moral unease at living in this economy.

This chapter argues that neoliberal ideology drives the disavowal of the climate crisis. Its focus is on implicatory disavowal, the idea we disavow knowing we are implicated in the damage caused by rising carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions because to know that would cause us moral disturbance. The chapter begins with an example of implicatory disavowal and then argues this is best understood not at the individual level but largely as an effect on people in neoliberal culture. This culture boosts un-care and undermines the caring part of people, with its overall effect being the moral deregulation of the mind.