Individual Moral Obligation: An Approach to Sustainability

In this paper, I propose individual moral responsibility as a viable approach to achieving environmental sustainability. I here argue that the burden individual moral responsibility places on all members of society is a better motivator for climate responsibility than other detached/impersonal and absolutist approaches that place moral responsibility on abstract entities like ‘government’ and ‘society.’ Impersonal and absolutist approaches – for example, Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative – with their blanket expectations of responsibility weaken substantive moral responsibility; they cannot offer a better motivation to act on the part of individuals who are the primary contributors to the fast degenerating climate crisis. I employ the alternative method of complementarity and the conversational method as viable approaches to motivating responsibility to attain individual moral obligations for environmental sustainability.