Wear a mask indoors. Lower your carbon footprint. Purchase fair trade goods. Take shorter showers. Remain six feet apart from others. Buy local produce. Switch to a vegan diet. Research companies to ensure they protect laborers. Protect your classmates from the spread of disease.
Every day, we are inundated with messaging about the importance of personal responsibility. I think this is beneficial in several ways. We can cultivate a sense of respect for one another, and our individual behaviors can positively impact the lives of others. We can encourage our peers to engage in the same positive behaviors that we adopt. When we commit to making small changes to our own lives, such as shopping at the farmers’ market or staying home when we feel sick, we tangibly improve the lives of people around us.
However, I also worry that this messaging obscures institutional responsibility for many of the problems this messaging attempts to solve. When institutions utilize personal responsibility messaging, they directly exploit our natural feelings of empathy for one another, neglecting to accept responsibility for their roles in creating these systemic problems. This week, I discuss a couple of the major examples of this phenomenon and consider how we could more effectively bridge personal and institutional perspectives to solve systemic problems.
Personal Carbon Footprint
Environmental messaging is something we encounter everywhere from the grocery store to the office. Whether emphasizing the importance of cutting fossil fuel usage or the need to adopt energy saving measures, environmental messaging makes us recognize that our small behaviors can have rippling impacts. Most of us have heard of or used the term “personal carbon footprint” to think about these impacts, but did you know this term was created by oil giant BP?
Due to backlash in the late twentieth century about the company’s harmful environmental practices, BP executives hired public relations firm Ogilvy & Mather to rehabilitate their image. BP and Ogilvy & Mather are directly responsible for creating and popularizing the term “carbon footprint” in 2004. Through clever marketing, BP could signal that individual production of heat-trapping carbon pollution was the true culprit behind increasingly worrying climate change.
Wait, but isn’t it a bad idea to fly transatlantically, drive a diesel engine, and eat lots of red meat? Well, our sense of individual responsibility for environmental degradation is still worth listening to. We can generate positive impacts for the environment and our neighbors by making greener choices as individuals. Realistically though, we need to analyze large institutions to see the main sources of environmental degradation.
When we combine personal and institutional responsibility, we can create effective and long-lasting solutions to broader problems we face in the world today.
The U.S. military is responsible for producing the same carbon footprint as 140 countries combined. BP estimates that energy use and the carbon footprint of energy production have increased to historic highs and at faster rates each year for the last decade. These institutions have been quietly driving catastrophic storms, global warming, icecap melting, and so many other dire climate crises, yet they call on individuals to take responsibility for their roles in creating these problems.
Masking Up for Campus
Though this may sound remarkably less relevant than your personal carbon footprint, messaging about safely responding to COVID-19 also reflects the tensions between individual and institutional responsibility. Students returning to college this fall likely see many signs reminding them to wash their hands, wear masks, keep social distance, and otherwise protect the more vulnerable members of their campus communities. These messages all create normatively good outcomes for the broader community when individuals take responsibility for their actions.
A lack of institutional responsibility and accountability remain in tension with the benefits of this personal responsibility messaging. Every university that asks students to come back to campus implicitly must accept responsibility for the consequences of this decision. Though we can be hopeful that individuals on college campuses will avoid socializing with their friends and adhere to other requirements, we know from experience and intuition that this is unlikely. Eighteen year olds sometimes make poor choices, but their choices to return to campus were endorsed by their schools.
In college towns and densely populated dormitories, we can expect the spread of a pandemic even if students perfectly follow all health directives they receive. Recent communications from universities about curtailing the spread of coronavirus place the blame on students for this outcome. Chancellor Daniel Diermeier of Vanderbilt University recently stated, “Prove the doubters wrong. Prove that you care deeply about your fellow students, our faculty, and staff.”
This statement neglects to accept that Vanderbilt made the decision to return to campus for in person classes this fall, while many of its peers, such as Georgetown and Princeton, made the difficult decision to offer an online-only semester. Students who were excited to return to Vanderbilt, even with all the challenges of modified classes, living arrangements, and dining options, are now being told that the failures of an in-person semester are their responsibility. This lack of institutional responsibility results in an unfair portion of blame and consequences falling on the shoulders of students, who already have enough to worry about this fall.
Bridging the Gap
Even though personal responsibility messaging is imperfect, we should continue using it to cultivate caring communities of individuals who seek to protect each other and make the world a better place for all. We must focus far more on making institutions accountable to the decisions they make which cause collective harms. Whether discussing the environment or the current pandemic, institutions must be held to account for their role in exacerbating systemic crises in the world.
As students, young professionals, and more broadly as citizens, we are in the ideal position to hold institutions to account through our voices and through our votes. When we combine personal and institutional responsibility, we can create effective and long-lasting solutions to broader problems we face in the world today.
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