What does it mean to be responsible—and, more urgently, what does it mean in the face of climate change? Traditional frameworks conceive of responsibility as individual, retrospective, and based on guilt. However, climate change is a collective harm with diffuse causes, intergenerational effects, and no clearly identified agents. More importantly, the climate crisis calls for an immediate response, not retrospective deliberation.
Top-down approaches, based on normative principles, often fail to address this urgency. In contrast, bottom-up or pragmatic approaches begin with the crisis itself. They are contextual, action-oriented, relationally sensitive, and often posthumanist, expanding moral concern beyond the human. Importantly, they rethink responsibility as a response to harm. Although these models value responsiveness, they do not explain what transforms it into action. Moral recognition is not enough: executive power is missing.
My thesis project proposes to explore the path of affective phenomena, particularly because of their motivational but also epistemic nature. In doing so, it introduces the idea of a feeling of responsibility as a new candidate for rethinking environmental ethics today.