ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that even though the best way to promote environmental responsibility would probably be to encourage people to develop and cultivate "green virtues", that this would be a rather lengthy project. It discusses the long-term challenge of cultivating a sense of responsibility, of promoting "responsibility-taking". The chapter examines how collective endeavours, such as engineering and research, can benefit from the ideal of internalised responsibility, that is, the cultivation and encouragement of responsibility as a virtue. It provides how the adult world should encourage a sense of responsibility in children with regard to risk. Responsibility is not just about blame, tasks or obligation, but also refers to a character trait, or a way of doing things in a certain, excellent and admirable, way. According to Schmidtz, the crucial distinction when we talk about social problems and challenges is not the one between individual and collective responsibility, but the one between internalised and externalised responsibility.
