Voluntariness, Democracy, and Climate Politics. A Social Philosophical Reconstruction

• Applicants: Dr. Philipp Schink; Professor Dr. Tilo Wesche
• Subject Area: Practical Philosophy
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 413222647

The social philosophy sub-project explores the meaning of voluntariness with regard to the social and political challenges posed by climate change. First, it investigates the conditions for the emergence of voluntary participation in a democratic climate politics. Second, it examines the ways in which understandings of voluntariness central to Western societies, with their respective underpinnings in conceptions of freedom, are both partly responsible for climate change as well as blocking a collective democratic socio-ecological transformation. With its first research objective, the sub-project continues to pursue the thesis of the first funding period, namely that the conditions for the emergence of voluntary participation in democratic politics are to be located in social practices that precede the political process. These practices can generally be characterized by the three structural features of self-purposefulness, contingency, and spontaneity. The sub-project asks about the specific practices that are necessary and appropriate to enable voluntary participation in climate politics. Moreover, it aims at a more precise characterization of the particular attitude associated with this voluntary participation. In doing so, the sub-project critically goes beyond socio-liberal approaches that locate the preconditions for the emergence of participation primarily in legal, material and institutional prerequisites of democratic participation. The second research objective is to analyze, in a critical perspective, the link between conceptions of the relation between freedom and voluntariness, climate change and environmental degradation. The role that such conceptions play in relation to the exploitation and destruction of nature as well as their role in blocking collective transformative strategies will be investigated. The sub-project takes its starting point in the contemporary discussion of freedom and focuses on both negative and positive concepts of freedom, examining with praxeological interest the specific practices associated with the respective conceptions of freedom. The sub-project also pursues the constructive perspective of determining elements of a sustainable understanding of voluntarism and its freedom-theoretical underpinnings. The social philosophical sub-project makes an indispensable conceptual contribution to the overall project. With its focus on climate politics, it contributes to broadening the thematic spectrum of voluntariness in the research group by a socio-political aspect of great relevance. The sub-project thus pursues the overarching goal of contributing to the debate on a democratic approach to climate change by traversing the issues of voluntary engagement and political participation, conceptions and practices of freedom.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 2983: Freiwilligkeit