Prof. Emily Huddart Kennedy talks about her new paper: The moral dimensions of environmental impact



UBC Sociology Professor Emily Huddart Kennedy and WSU Sociology Professor Christine Horne recently published a paper examining how people make moral judgments about individual efforts to reduce environmental impact. We interviewed Prof. Emily Huddart Kennedy about the reasons for investigating the morality of reducing environmental impact, the way environmental practices influence moral judgments, the vignette experiment, and more.

How did you come to be investigating the morality of reducing environmental impact?

I was interviewing people about their relationships with the environment and in those interviews, I noticed something that surprised me. When I asked people to describe the sort of person who has a small footprint on the environment, many of my participants distinguished between two types: people who are consciously making efforts to reduce how much they consume and buy eco-friendly products (intentional environmentalists), and people who consume very little out of necessity or circumstance (accidental environmentalists). When I asked them to describe how they felt about people like this, they told me they admired the intentional environmentalist and felt they really cared about the environment but felt no admiration for the accidental environmentalist. This distinction led me to work on a study that would allow me to understand who gets credit for “being green”, and who doesn’t.

When do environmental practices and impact influence moral judgements? What did you discover about how evaluators gauge intentionality?

People seem to see environmental practices and impacts as having a moral valence when they believe that those practices and impacts are undertaken intentionally. And people gauged intentionality through a few heuristics, but the most interesting to me was income: if they were judging someone low-income, they did not draw conclusions about morality based on the person’s environmental impacts. That is, if I asked them to think about a household with a really large footprint, they told me that if that household was poor, they probably just didn’t know any better. But if they were rich, people told me they thought the people in the household were likely greedy and selfish. That is, at least in the context of household efforts to protect the environment, people use income as a metric to estimate a household’s capacity to act intentionally.

Prof. Emily Huddart Kennedy

You used an online vignette experiment to confirm the moral judgements of liberals and conservatives? Can you explain how that experiment worked to confirm the effects you found?

In the interviews, I noticed that the political liberals I interviewed were more likely than conservatives to make these moral judgments. In other words, for liberals, a person’s impact on the environment and engagement in environmental practices are morally relevant. I didn’t see this pattern as clearly among the conservatives I interviewed. I reached out to a colleague who had a great deal of experience using vignette experiments and we designed a study together to see how generalizable the themes in the interview study were. We were fortunate to receive funding from TESS (Time-Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences), which allowed us access to a nationally-representative sample. What we found confirmed the patterns in the interviews – people only made moral judgments of a person’s environmental practices and impacts if they saw these as morally-relevant behaviours. And liberals were much more likely than conservatives to do so. Those who saw environmental impact as morally-relevant (mostly liberals), only made moral judgements of high-income households.

Why do people view high-income earners engaged in green practices as more moral?

People see high-income green households as more ethical than high-income households with a large ecological footprint. And that implies that people, for the most part, see efforts to protect the environment as something that good people do. Yet when comparing high-income and low-income, green households, people tend not to see the low-income household’s actions as having anything to do with morality. And it is that distinction that is so puzzling to me. My guess is that we see income as a marker of intentionality in the environmental domain in part because culturally, many people in Western, industrialized contexts perceive individuals’ consumer choices as being individuals’ most powerful vehicle for protecting the environment. This cultural pattern is likely bolstered by broader political shifts that have imbued profit-making businesses with a great deal of power, including the power to imagine solutions to environmental crises.

What do you want readers to take away from this paper?

One thing I would like a social science audience to take away from this paper is to note that people use income as an indicator of intentionality. This makes me wonder whether this holds in settings other than environmental protection—what about crime? Or parenting? Or is there something unique about the field of environmental protection that leads people to associate income and intentionality?

For readers interested in environmental protection, one of the broader implications of the paper concerns political polarization. I believe these findings indicate that political liberals and conservatives speak a different language when it comes to environmental protection, which likely makes it more difficult to achieve bipartisan support for environmental protection. I’m currently working on a book project and part of the goal of that project is to demonstrate that while there are schisms across political divides like the moral judgement I focus on in this paper, a common foundation is that everyone cares about the environment. We just do so in ways that can seem incompatible.

I also hope this paper can prompt reflection on the sorts of moral judgements we make about environmental practices. For instance, when we judge a person’s moral worth based on their environmental impact, does that support or threaten efforts to protect the environment? Is our social tendency to exclude poor households from moral judgements something that reinforces discrimination against the poor? And if so, how? What would it look like, instead, to trust that everyone cares about the environment and to look for the ways in which they do so?