Living a Moral Life in a Catastrophic World, with Philosopher Travis Rieder

KEVIN MALONEY: How can we live an ethical life in a seemingly catastrophic world? With climate change advancing and humanitarian abuses continuing unchecked, many of us are left feeling helpless with this sense that the problems of today are simply too big to address on our own.

For the latest episode of the Values & Interests podcast, I am happy to be joined by moral philosopher Travis Rieder. As an associate research professor at Johns Hopkins University, Travis works to analyze and address some of the most challenging moral questions in our political and cultural environments. He is also the author of one of my favorite books of the past few years, Catastrophe Ethics: How to Choose Well in a World of Tough Choices. We cover a range of topics from the importance of embracing moral leadership to practical ways of dealing with this pull of nihilism that many of us are feeling in our own lives today.

I hope you find this conversation as enlightening and helpful as I did, and as always, be sure to subscribe to Carnegie Council.

Travis, thanks so much for being here. It is always great to get the moral philosophers in front of us at Carnegie Council.

TRAVIS RIEDER: Thanks for having me, and thanks for your nice words about the book. I appreciate that.

KEVIN MALONEY: Before we jump into the wider conversation about the ethical toolkit for living your daily life, I want to give our listeners a sense of your own value system. I always like asking moral philosophers the question: How did you choose to make your life about moral philosophy and what were the light bulb moments when you said, “Okay, this is not only informing my personal path but my professional path as well?”

TRAVIS RIEDER: I think when you ask a lot of people that, folks in general, a lot of folks will reference religion or spirituality as a place they get morality and values from. I was pretty young when I left the church I was raised in, so I didn’t have that anymore, and I was drawn to philosophy as soon as I discovered it was a thing, when I got to college and took philosophy courses. I see much of my young adulthood as searching for a value system, something to grab onto, because I was always convinced that even though I left spirituality or something it did not mean that anything goes, that without god all is permitted.

When I went to philosophy I found that philosophers who are interested in ethics very often play this game where they decide for themselves on a system of values, and because philosophers love great monolithic structures they spend a career or lifetime building up their own preferred monolithic structure, and that is their value system and they go around and apply it to every problem they find. I was drawn to that because that is what philosophers do.

When I went to graduate school I was fortunate to go to Georgetown University, which has a very cool Philosophy Department. I would say the Philosophy Department there is very pluralistic; they let in a lot of different voices. Also they are exceptionally kind and nuanced in their thinking. My faculty there taught me just through practice that anything that is worth thinking hard about in ethics is genuinely difficult.

When you hang out with philosophers they so often make it sound like once you have figured out the great monolithic structure that is true all the other problems are simple and you just go around and are like, “Well, world hunger is solved this way, climate change is solved this way, abortion is solved this way,” and there is nothing hard. It all strikes me as hard. If it is a question that people struggle with, it is because there is something genuinely interesting and difficult there.

That is a long, rambling, philosophical way of saying that my value structure is deeply pluralistic and is committed to there being a lot of insights from all different perspectives, many of which I won’t come up with on my own. It is a lot about engaging and interpersonal dialogue. If you are thinking about it in terms of politics, it is very democratic—you have to live with other people and get along with them—but even taking politics out of it, it is about building a community, and the way you respect other people is by engaging them in good faith. That is where I start.

KEVIN MALONEY: You hit some key terms and notes there that are central to us at the Council as well in terms of “good faith” and a “pluralistic” approach. When we are building communities here at Carnegie Council there is a huge appetite for an array of political views and an array of values if you are playing within the pluralistic sandbox. That is a delineation line for me in terms of good faith and bad faith, so if you are trying to blow up the sandbox but you want to enter the discussion to do so or you are trying to knock it down from the outside.

I recently had a conversation with Simon Longstaff, who is a moral philosopher and leads The Ethics Centre in Australia, and he talked about the difference between “performative” good faith and actual good faith. That definitely has informed my thinking in terms of how you actually create civic spaces to have discussions and the difference between performative good faith and actual good faith. The binary is pretty obvious between good and bad faith, but it is the middle ground between them, and I think ethics is a tool to work through that.

TRAVIS RIEDER: For sure. I don’t know if you intend for this to come up later in the conversation, but this seems to have gotten so much harder in my lifetime, and surely social media has something to do with it and surely the Internet has something to do with it. Man, we are in love with our teams. You sign on to a team and now you know what the party line is and you better stick to it or you get shunned. That is a recipe for terrible thinking.

Some of what I struggle with right now is that I imagine there are a variety of teams that would claim me based on some of the things I believe, but if we get into a conversation I am probably not going to agree with everything they say. They are dismissive of their interlocutors and opponents, and I might say, “Hey, slow down, this group over here has something to take seriously.” It is getting harder for sure.

KEVIN MALONEY: I will pivot to this next question around the moral toolkits that people possess right now and whether they are fit for purpose for this moment. I am posing a question there, but I want to go back to the recent interview with Simon. He talks about this conflation of concepts. Just because you have a set of values and principles you can think you are living a moral life, but are you living an ethical life?

The other part of the equation there is that you constantly have to challenge your values, your values inform your interests, and it is an interconnected cycle. There is a difference between the ethical, reflective life and the moral life to an extent, but I want to get your reaction to that statement and then possibly bridge to the moral toolkits that are available today for this quite complicated, zero-sum, politicized world that we find ourselves in.

TRAVIS RIEDER: Those definitely feel related to me. I think a lot of us who spend our time thinking about ethics, whether it is because we are professional moral philosophers, committed to civic engagement, or want to be a good person, we are desperate for rules. Rules have a great pedigree. Decalogues are everywhere, these ten “Thou Shalt Nots” and you are good to go. I have a hard time getting into the headspace where I think you follow some relatively short set of rules and then your moral job is done. It is perfectly possible to never kill anyone and never lie to anyone and still be a total jerk.

I think a lot of the interesting ethical stuff of life is much harder than “Are you violating some strict duty?” That is important. It is important that we figure whether or not you are ever allowed to steal. It is important, but it is not where the job ends.

KEVIN MALONEY: At the Council we translate this into the international relations (IR) world and think about norms and laws, but we always try to make the distinction that that is the floor that society has decided to build itself around, but there is a higher moral responsibility when it comes to the individual living within that society.

You touch on that in the book, but I want to pivot to an anecdote early in the book in terms of your time at Hanover, where you describe your first foray into this climate and ethics world. One of the things that hit me was this example of recycling that you talked about, that at first glance it feels right, it feels righteous, it feels virtuous, and it almost feels obvious. There is this community of obvious virtue that starts to cycle around this concept of recycling, and I think you can fill in the blank with a bunch of other things throughout your life, but maybe you can talk through that scenario that you describe in the book for our listeners because I think there is a necessary moral epiphany at the end of it.

TRAVIS RIEDER: It is funny. It is hard for me to admit that college was 20 years ago. I don’t have so many brightly remembered intellectual moments, but this one sticks out. It was when I was researching for the book that I remembered this and thought, Oh, man, I’ve been thinking about this for that long.

I was walking across campus through a thoroughfare. A lot of us had just walked out of probably a moral philosophy class with one of my mentors. I think we were walking out of Existentialism, but somehow we got on the topic of climate change and climate mitigation stuff, and a lot of my friends were people who I admired but who I would never be and that is because they were hippies. I think I describe them in the book as proudly ragged and would never put on new clothes, don’t shower very often, but committed to a minimalist impact on the environment lifestyle. I cared about those things, but I was just not that way.

We were having this conversation and talking about recycling. I did and do recycle despite all the weird stuff about it, but I was bothered by the trenchant moralism of “What kind of jerk wouldn’t recycle?”

I timidly said: “I get it. Don’t hate me. I could recycle my whole life and the world wouldn’t notice. It wouldn’t make an impact. There wouldn’t be any straight line drawn from a harm to my change in behavior.” I remember feeling so self-conscious as the all stopped and looked at me.

KEVIN MALONEY: I can imagine the stares.

TRAVIS RIEDER: “Why would you play devil’s advocate?” But I wasn’t; I was genuine. It bothered me.

This professor—I do remember who it was but I don’t name her in the book—has been listening. This is a small liberal arts college where professors and students are very close and spend a lot of time together, so she was listening and noticed the pause. She sidled up beside me, linked arms with me and linked arms with the person next to me, and said, “But it’s not just you. Now there are two of us.”

It was this elegant move, and everyone was like: “Phew! Thank god we solved that.” I laughed, they laughed, and the conversation moved on. Then I thought to myself: That doesn’t solve anything. That doesn’t answer my question, but I stopped asking about it at least for then.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think that is a great example of what you talked about before in terms of wanting an answer, but ethics actually supplies another question. It unlocks the constant questioning in life.

At the Council we think about this in three-dimensional ethics in terms of ends, means, and consequences when you are thinking about the foreign policy world, and that’s great, but once you get to a reflective point it just starts the cycle again. That is the burden for how we think about applied ethics here, especially if you are in a leadership position and especially if you are in a position of power understanding that, the dynamic you talk about in the book in terms of individualism versus institutional responsibility, but as a political leader, as anything, as a teacher, you have influence outside yourself.

Before we get into the climate side I want to touch on the leadership aspect of it. You cover this in the book, and through the Council’s perspective around the principle of democracy and pluralism there is a spectrum when it comes to leadership. There is a real tension when it comes to pluralism in terms of the negative consequences of bad leadership, but there is also a huge upside in terms of moral leadership and what that can do from a transformative perspective.

You talk about Joe Manchin casting this vote to pass the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the biggest piece of climate legislation, through back in 2022.

TRAVIS RIEDER: Early in Biden’s term, yes.

KEVIN MALONEY: From an IR perspective an example is President Truman. He has this basic blank check during the Korean War militarily and politically to use nuclear weapons when we are losing in Korea, but he makes a moral decision not to do this because he does not want to see more dead children. That is not insignificant. That is millions of people who are alive. This is not ethics as something that sits on the side and is just performative. I want to get into the leadership aspect and the tension around that when we think about both living an ethical life and looking to people to be mentors or be moral guides for us and how the leadership dynamic should interact with our personal daily life there.

TRAVIS RIEDER: I love this question because leadership comes in lots of forms. In politics it can be obvious because you have senators casting tiebreaking votes and standing up as moral exemplars ideally, you have presidents and governors with executive power making decisions, so you have Truman in your case, but also you can have leadership of a pretty similar sort by being a celebrity. What is interesting about our world now is that you can carry truly massive influence without being in elected office or something like that.

One of the examples I think about a lot is—this might be because I have an 11-year-old—pop stars, especially like the very highest tiers of Taylor Swift or Beyoncé. They have more power than many political leaders. I really like the example of Taylor Swift because she is neither a fantastic exemplar nor someone I think you should use as a bad example because she takes her responsibility pretty seriously. In politics she wrestled with whether or not she should come out against Trump during the first term when a lot of her advisors were telling her, “You don’t do that, you’re a pop star, that is not the sort of leader that you are,” but then she also flies a private jet all around the world.

Now we have this broad array of leaders, and one of the things I think about—I teach a class on catastrophe ethics for undergrads. I teach at Johns Hopkins, and a lot of these students fancy themselves being leaders of a form in one way or another, and one of the things we talk about is that becoming a leader can be interpreted as scaling a ladder of influence and therefore responsibility. Part of the tension that starts our conversation and that we will probably continue talking about is that I am just one person in a world of 8-plus billion people that is run by institutions—not just governments but massive multinational corporations; I don’t have any real power to influence, but Bill Gates has power to influence and Donald Trump has power to influence, and all sorts of elected officials have power to influence, and you can scale that level.

My comment in the book about Joe Manchin is that when he cast the tiebreaking vote for the Inflation Reduction Act, yes, he was an individual but he was not the sort of individual where we say, “You don’t have power over the future or real impact.” It was more like an institution. Joe Manchin casting that vote had more like the power of an entire government behind him.

If you have as a goal becoming a leader I think one of the things you should think about in a world like ours is that part of what you are trying to do is accumulate the sort of influence that comes with significant responsibility because your actions now no longer represent you as a private individual; they represent an institution or institutions or many thousands, millions, or even billions of people. Leadership is a very serious moral calling, I think.

KEVIN MALONEY: One of the things we think about a lot here is the disconnect on the incentive structure of leading right now. If you are not financially rewarded or are not rewarded with some prestige or celebrity but at the same time are being asked to take on this burden of leadership in an arena right now that is a big microscope—it is the willingness to understand that the return on investment is not personal glorification. There is a select group of people who are willing to do that.

We see this play out in politics a lot. Political leadership does not have to be a political calculation. You make that choice. Sometimes you have to lead from a position of moral clarity and you have to bring people along with you. Our president at the Council, Joel Rosenthal, talks about this a lot in terms of that there seems to be a widening gap between that from an action standpoint and also an understanding of that from a leadership standpoint in American politics.

TRAVIS RIEDER: Absolutely. The incentive structure is maybe the biggest problem for leadership. If you take just the U.S. political context, the fact that so many decisions are driven by short-term electoral policies—I have to get elected in two, four, or six years—basically means that if that is a driving consideration we are not going to solve generational problems like climate change. I am trying to think off the top of my head how many leaders seem to have an ideology that they would take a chance on losing an election for. On both sides of the aisle I can think of a few but not that many, and that is a real problem.

KEVIN MALONEY: It is also understanding the space to operate within, especially within an open society as a politician. We think about this spectrum at the Council between this naïve idealism and amoral political realism. From an open society perspective it is not only operating within that spectrum but is also recognizing the trap of going too far to one side or the other. Of course the trap of naïve idealism is that it may not produce what you want and you might be out of power. The trap of amoral realism is that you eventually become the autocracy or oligarchy you thought you were fighting against.

Our listeners have heard me harp on this over and over again, but there are a lot of interesting thinkers post-World War II, but from an American context to your point too that moral toolkit is getting a bit old. What is the next version of that as the international system transitions? I am sure there will be more conversations on this podcast about that in the future.

I want to pivot now to the climate side of things, which is what the book focuses on within this framework of moral responsibility. In the early chapters of the book you discuss four scenarios that the United Nations is laying out in the future. I am going to make a Dune reference in terms of the top tier, but this “golden path” for humanity in terms of everybody gets along, we mitigate climate threats, and it’s all good.

Then we have these three bleaker scenarios where we survive and mitigate to an extent, but the same way we went up the moral ladder before, the leadership ladder, we are going down where each tier when it comes to warming, basically people who didn’t cause climate change and benefited least from the Industrial Revolution suffer the most.

I was hoping you could give a snapshot and maybe talk through some of the nuances of those four scenarios because that is the moral world that I am going to be living in when I am old and my son will be living in. What does that look like? I want to try to understand the environment that is coming for us.

TRAVIS RIEDER: One thing about climate ethics is that it is really dark but also is not ethics; it is trying to understand what are our possible futures. The folks who work on this are computer modelers, so they run scenarios.

It is a very computationally expensive process, but it is also a moral process in some way. The folks who come up with futures, or “scenarios” is actually the technical term—the computer modelers, say: “Look, I can’t predict the future; I can predict a future given that agents relevantly like us make certain decisions, so tell me which decisions they are going to make.” Then we have to give them a bunch of things.

We say: “Well, something like the IRA passes and does not get rescinded a few years later, and then we scale up our mitigation efforts. This leads our international partners, especially China, to similarly come to the table and work hard as well. It makes blocks like the European Union even more committed, and we have this mutually reinforcing model.”

Okay, great. Then they can plug those in as variables and see what happens, but then there are all the worst versions of that too where we become retrenchantly nationalist and make very irrational choices to go back to not very profitable fossil fuels just because, I guess.

The green path, or as you say the “golden” path is the most optimistic scenario. I have literally never spoken to anyone who works in climate science, climate ethics, or climate policy who thinks this is possible. It is technically possible, or at least it was when I wrote the book and when the model was published. So it is possible according to the physics of the world, but it is not practically possible, and what that world looks like is that we do not limit warming to 1.5°C, which was the goal that was laid out in the Paris Accords but only barely overshoot it.

One of the things we don’t talk about enough in climate policy is how much we overshoot and for how long. It matters because if we start to draw down our emissions, then our atmospheric carbon concentration goes up but then it starts to fall again—it peaks and then starts to come back down—so warming lasts for a while and then we start to cool.

On the green pathway we don’t warm all that much more, maybe 1.6°C to 1.7°C, but then it is supposed to come down. That wouldn’t be great. Look at the world right now. We are already kind of on fire, but it would be so much better than the other possible futures. But it is not realistic. It requires a rabid obsession with decarbonization.

KEVIN MALONEY: One of the things that jumped out to me in the early chapters too from an applied ethics perspective is the want or need for people to put stuff into binaries; we either have climate change or we don’t. You talk about the fact that it is happening and the literal degrees of separation here can mean millions and millions of people’s lives. So there is a moral nuance and a human cost nuance that you have to account for, but people don’t want to from a contextual standpoint. They just want to say I’m for it or against it or we are either going to stop it or it is going to be here and then whatever, we will deal with it.

TRAVIS RIEDER: Absolutely. This is one of my favorite things to say to people when they give me a cynical response to teaching or lecturing. Sometimes they say: “Look, if it’s not possible to avoid dangerous climate change, why not just eat, drink, and be merry? The world is going to burn.”

The response is, because climate change is not binary. It is not that either we hit dangerous climate change or we don’t. How dangerous it is matters. Intuitively we can show that because every tenth of a degree is associated with more climate harms, especially the heat. We don’t talk about the heat enough. The other stuff is so violent that it captures the imagination, the hurricanes and the wildfires, but heat death is going to be a huge part of our future, especially if you happen to be living in the Middle East, North Africa, or the Mediterranean. The harms go up significantly with every tenth of a degree.

To illustrate this I cite a study—since I did not prepare to summarize this study, I am not going to give you the exact details—if we aim at one of the worst futures, the global average temperature rise is going to be close to 4°C, 3.7°C, 4.1°C, something like that. At that level we are looking at 81 million people dying just from heat death by the year 2100. That is the scale we are looking at.

If we could limit warming to not great but to something approaching realistic, like 2.4°C, 2.5°C, something like that, something on a par with where we are heading or where we were when I wrote the book, then we could reduce that number of heat deaths to 9 million or something. Again don’t quote me; the numbers are in the book. You could save 60 to 70 million people from heat death by the end of the century by getting to not great instead of catastrophic. That is why this isn’t binary. Every bit counts.

KEVIN MALONEY: This goes directly in terms of what we are thinking about. College students will come here or fellows will come here and we will talk to them about applied ethics. It is about making the most responsible choice. Sometimes there is a good or bad answer inherently right in the beginning of making the decision, but we don’t have this moral crystal ball. We can’t see past our own choices. We have to own the consequences and then adjust, but this is a very literal example where if you don’t even tackle the ethical question people are going to die.

There are two ends of the nihilism spectrum here. There is the, “I’m so committed to climate change and I don’t think I can do anything and I fall into nihilism,” and then there is this purposeful political nihilism—“Yeah, not important to me”—in terms of prioritization.

I know you talk about nihilism in the book. Our president at the Council, Joel Rosenthal, wrote a piece on this in terms of moral resilience a few months back, but keeping on the ethics focus could you pick apart nihilism and its role in the current “climate catastrophe” if I can steal from your book a little bit.

TRAVIS RIEDER: I got interested in nihilism of a particular sort. Sometimes we say, “So and so is a nihilist,” and we just mean they are a cynic or they are dark and mopey. I mean nihilism in the technical sense that when confronted with these massive collective threats—we are going to talk mostly about climate change, but all sorts of capitalistic infrastructure, the fact that we are this massive globally connected system, so if you think animal rights are important, then the situation with animals is an absolute catastrophe, also, human rights abuses and the supply chain, slave labor, that sort of thing—we say: “I am just an individual. These problems are massive on a global scale involving networks and systems that I cannot possibly grasp.”

The nihilist says, “The result of my evaluating that accurately, noting that I cannot make a real difference, means that there are no moral facts relevant to me.” The jargon-y philosophy here is that a nihilist believes that there is “nothing of something,” so the nihilist here says, “There aren’t any moral facts that apply to me about climate change or about slave labor and the supply chain.”

You tell me that my favorite chocolate brand involves slave labor at the bottom of the supply chain, and I say, “Yes, but I can’t stop that, so I am going to keep eating my chocolate.” That is a form of nihilism: “I don’t think it’s a burden on me to boycott this company because my boycott doesn’t matter.” That shows up in climate change.

The reason I got interested in this is because I work with young people. I teach college students, and their nihilism is even a bit more sophisticated because: 1) they don’t think they can make a difference accurately understanding the system; 2) they say that it is the system’s responsibility—which is true—so it is the job of multinational corporations and governments; and 3) therefore it is not my job because they are putting it on me as this grotesque abdication of responsibility, saying, “Hey, 18-year-old who did not choose any of this, it is your job to fix it.”

They are multiply nihilist. They are like: “There are no moral facts that apply to me,” but also: “Are you kidding me? This is not my job. Clean up your own mess, old people.”

KEVIN MALONEY: This is at a lower scale, but it literally cost me money. I was coming out of college during the financial crash. You have your life laid out for you, you think you are going to get a job, and then, boom!

For the years after 2011 and 2012, when you are finally getting a job, I remember feeling this anger and this bitterness toward the financial world, and I remember making a very stupid decision where my company was offering a 401(k) match, and I asked, “Why would I give money to the people who just blew up the system and ruined my life for four years?” So I just waited.

There is value in that emotion, but it does not take into account the context in terms of the way the world is working. While I felt righteous in the moment, in the years I lost that compounding interest. I am 36, so I feel like I am on this island between I’m not young and I’m not old and I don’t understand anybody. That is an anecdote from my years right after college.

TRAVIS RIEDER: That sounds very familiar. My students are that on steroids because—this is a bit of an exaggeration—they have grown up with catastrophe after catastrophe because they were kids during the financial crisis, so their parents weathered that or didn’t, then they were quite young when COVID-19 hit, they have seen this vicious seesawing in our political system, and they are young enough that Donald Trump has always been on the scene. That is strange for me because the political world has changed so much since he showed up.

I grew up when Clinton and Bush were the figures of “Are you a progressive or are you a conservative?” It feels almost quaint now. We were very strong in our opinions, and I thought Bush made a mess of a bunch of stuff, which he did, but I also believed that I could sit down and have a good-faith discussion with him or any of his followers and it could potentially even lead to progress, yet my students have grown up in a world where these catastrophes have happened one after the other, and I don’t think they have ever seen that sort of good-faith engagement from leaders. It doesn’t show up on the Internet, it doesn’t show up on social media, and it doesn’t show up on the late-night talk shows where they get their news.

KEVIN MALONEY: As a child who grew up in the nineties, I think this goes back to similar experiences in terms of the point I made before, the “pluralistic sandbox,” the good-faith sandbox, now to basically have an entire generation that has grown up where the other side is the enemy—at least from an American context—and you are seeing the consequences of that now from a policy perspective, from a normative perspective in international relations, and from an international law perspective in terms of what is happening now.

I want to go further into the climate change dynamic around this personal responsibility versus institutional dynamic. There is a line in your book: “The big polluters’ master stroke was to blame the climate crisis on you and me.” If I could take one line and summarize the entire book in terms of what it alludes to, it felt like that was it for me. I want to tee you up with that to dig into it.

TRAVIS RIEDER: I have been talking about the book now for over a year, and it has morphed in my head what the punchline is. We think about nihilism as the core problem to be solved, and the reason I considered that a problem to be solved is that I don’t think it’s true. The nihilist says: “Because I can’t make a difference, there are no moral facts that apply to me. I can’t make a difference in any of these big problems, so eat, drink, and be merry.”

I don’t think it is true and I don’t think it is acceptable in our society. I think the first half is true, which is that they cannot make a difference in their individual private actions, that none of us, who are just tiny people, can’t. We are not casting the tiebreaking vote on the IRA; we are just you and I.

The puzzle then is, if you concede the empirical fact that my individual acts don’t matter, why doesn’t the moral fact follow that I should therefore be permitted to do anything? That is the puzzle.

The move is to say, “We have been obsessed with these old moral tools.” Old moral tools are that the only way you can generate something ethically worth talking about is if you can generate a strict duty that we can beat each other over the head with. It is wrong of you to punch me in the nose just like it is wrong of you to commit murder just like it is wrong of entire corporations and nation-states to pollute, and those are the strict wrongs that we can then say, “Well, the nation-states have a duty to clean up climate change in the same way that you have a duty not to punch me, but I can’t have a duty to clean up climate change.”

So the move is to say, “Let’s broaden our moral toolbox” because to start out the way that you did, if the ethical is bigger than just the strictly moral, you can follow the rules and still be a jerk. In the words of my mentor, Maggie Little, “A huge part of ethics is the suberogatory.” Erogatory is the duty stuff. Just below that is important. It matters to us mightily whether or not the people around us are jerks even if they follow all the rules.

A big part of the puzzle is trying to think about what these tools could be, but there is this other component, which is that the systems and structures are actively doing wrong. I don’t want us to say that that is not true just because you and I can have some responsibility to bind together and try to engage in collective action. That certainly doesn’t mean that the U.S. government right now is morally permitted to roll back environmental policy. No, it is an egregious wrong. It is a wrong that—we should be honest—will result in thousands, tens of thousands, and depending on how long it goes on it could scale up to millions of lives being lost or severely harmed, so it is an egregious wrong.

Why doesn’t their responsibility also get us off the hook? Why is it the case that I can still have responsibility when they are the ones who have real power? These are two sides of it, and I think both need to be answered: Why is it possible for me to have responsibility given that I cannot make a difference; and then why would we say that I have a responsibility given that the real work should be done by governments, multinational corporations, and that sort of thing?

I am very concerned about the idea—this has gotten a lot of play recently—that as soon as you recognize that the United States and China as nation-states and then British Petroleum and Shell and a whole bunch of the top 100 companies are responsible for all of this harm that is coming through their emissions, that that somehow gets us off the hook because the structures should then take it on.

What I think we need to be able to do is think about what can and therefore should I do with my time and resources, etc., and some of that is going to involve recycling and composting, investing in energy-efficient appliances, buying an electric car instead of a gas guzzler, and installing solar panels if you can, what I call this “purity” stuff, trying to minimize my impact on the environment.

KEVIN MALONEY: There is a sense of irony there in the prescription for saying it is not your responsibility or it is out of your control is to give up more agency by not engaging. This scales to a lot of issues in the national security space: “Well, I have nothing to do with that,” but in a liberal, open society where you are provided the freedom to at least create a community around a concern, to give that up seems to be antithetical to what you were trying to achieve at its core.

TRAVIS RIEDER: A hundred percent. I end the book—because it is a bit of a dark read—

KEVIN MALONEY: I will give you credit. You say that a bunch, so you prime the audience.

TRAVIS RIEDER: I try to end the book with why I think we should actually feel better about thinking this through. Writing the book, which was just the culmination of 10 to 20 years of thinking this through and trying to work on it, was like self-therapy because I do think giving up more agency as a response to stolen agency is another catastrophe. It is catastrophic to my sense of meaning. It is catastrophic to my ability to feel like I matter morally in this world, so I do in fact think there is an existential reason for trying to regain agency, for figuring out what it is that I can and should in fact do because it is salvaging meaning in a world that feels like it is trying to strip it away from us.

We go back to that point of, how do we respond to people who say, “Well, this is Shell’s problem and the U.S. government’s problem and not mine?” My question every day is: I have to get up and do something. If it feels like there are better and worse choices vis-à-vis my interactions with the environment, I want to know which ones are better and worse and why.

Some of the better actions I do think will be that purist stuff. I don’t think you are obligated to organize your life around trying to get solar panels because only if you get solar panels are you a decent person. That seems obviously false to me. Most people in America can’t afford solar panels because that is our messed-up economy, so that is not a requirement, but a whole bunch of people can afford them, and I think it is good to invest in a technology that we need to invest in.

Then there is other stuff. There is stuff where you try to build the structure that will force change at the systemic level. If you want to say that the problem is with our multinational corporations and our governments, etc., the systems of power, then one of the ways you can respond is to say, “Fine, I’m not going to worry so much about purity; I’m going to worry about trying to tear it down.” So you get involved and build community and phone bank for radical politicians and that is what you spend your time and energy doing, and I think that is an equally good life. You could probably convince me that there is an argument that actually says for a lot of people it is a better life. One of the arguments of the book is that there is no one-size-fits-all here.

KEVIN MALONEY: That is important. Going back to the agency question, the ability to create community—you invest in a stock market when it is low, not when it is high. In terms of what is happening now politically related to fractured shared community and fractured shared understanding of values, if your issue is that you feel alone and don’t feel like you can have an impact, you have to start somewhere. You can multiply that by two and then it can exponentially increase if you put your agency into that.

In terms of creating in-person, non-digital communities that can have a domino effect in your personal life, professional life, mental health, and your physical health. Fill in the blank. Get a dog, walk the dog with other people, basic 101 things that people, especially in this digital and politically tense environment, to some extent the answers are right in front of us in terms of what our parents did and what we did growing up. People don’t want to look to that necessarily.

Something that has been coming up in conversations a lot with academics is talking about the value of being able to critically sit with something, not for a day, not for a week, but for maybe five years. When I speak to academics they say that off the cuff, but most people don’t have the opportunity to do that.

A few years ago I went back and got my Master’s and was focused on a theory of IR. The best part about it was not doing the kinetic side of work and meetings every day, but like, “I’m going to write this 10,000-word article.” I had not had that experience in over a decade or never seriously had it because undergrad was a thing to get through and now you are self-selecting into something to do.

Creating more spaces—I know it’s a luxury and comes with a sense of privilege—to critically think about something, whether it is a hobby, or whether it is writing an academic article is an amazing thing to do, but not many people have the opportunity to do that, so how do we reckon with that?

TRAVIS RIEDER: It is an incredible privilege, a hundred percent. One of the great benefits of my life is that I get to have long thinking sessions, not because I get to sit for a few hours a day, but yes, because I get to ferment an idea for years.

One of the things I have been most impressed with—this is my second book, which you may or may not know. My first book was very different. It was on pain and opioids and America’s drug overdose crisis. They are both trade books, popular books rather than from academic presses. One of the great benefits of doing that is that I talked to a lot of readers, and what I mean by that is not just people who have read my book, but the sort of people who read my nerdy books are active readers. They read a lot.

Because I have to read so much very often boring stuff for my job I feel very good if I read five or ten books in a year for pleasure, intellectually stimulating stuff. I talk to a lot of people who read 20, 30, or 50 books a year, and what they do at night is sit down and read a few chapters of a book and do that all the time.

I will say that although I think one of the great privileges of my life is that I get to think and create by writing, the folks who read a lot sit with ideas for a long time. It is impressive because they will have read dozens of books on politics. Yes, I studied political philosophy for a while, but they have so many different perspectives on what is happening in Russia and how to understand that from the historical perspective and what it means for today, and you do get to sit with those ideas and they stew and reveal interesting things about the world.

I think a lot of people could do this, and it is one of my missions to get more people to read and think about cool stuff.

KEVIN MALONEY: Empirically it is very hard to measure. My own research focuses on narratives. You think about the parallel to reading a book or receiving a message from a place, but the thing that has been most convincing to me in the literature from a psychology perspective is when people feel confident enough to socialize what they have learned. They have sat with it and now will bring it up in a bar or bring it up with their family around dinner. That is the moment because you have internalized it and learned it with confidence to make it your own piece of wisdom or knowledge.

There are insidious ends to that spectrum in terms of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation, but at the end of the day I think we need to create more opportunities for people to sit with the long-form stuff. That is going to be a big challenge for the coming years. We won’t go down the artificial intelligence rabbit hole and the information rabbit hole right now.

Before we go I want to open the floor. We have covered a lot today in terms of individual moral responsibility, system level, and climate change. When people are thinking about their ethical toolkit in what now feels like an existential moment, can you leave our listeners with one thing to think about?

TRAVIS RIEDER: Such a good prompt. I think the simple version is that just because you can’t do everything doesn’t mean you can’t do something, and by doing something you not only respond to very real moral reasons that are calling you to engage in the world but are also responding to this threat to your agency. You are like, “Oh, no, I do get to build my life and forge a decent life even though you have put me into this system that feels like it robs me of so much.” Do something. There is the tag line.

KEVIN MALONEY: I love ending on that high note.

Travis, thank you so much for joining us. I appreciate it.

TRAVIS RIEDER: Absolutely. Thanks for having me on.