10 - Do people agree with the environmental ethos?

Summary

Introduction

The issue of reasoned agreement with a social ethos is an intricate one. In contrast to the acceptance issue, we do not present new survey material here. Instead we shall spend time in reviewing observed attitudes in environmental dilemmas. The results were presented in part II, from the actor's perspective. It was shown that respondents rationally cooperate or defect in the stylized game form of the dilemma, in their role of ‘Individual’ versus ‘The Others’, depending on their preferences over the game's four outcomes. The observed diversity in preferences is linked to the respondents’ diverse stances on the motivational dimensions of Valuation and Willingness, according to criteria of internal consistency. Moreover, diversity of response occurs not only between individual respondents, but between the same respondent's stances in different dilemmas as well. In short, different people respond differently to the general challenge of the dilemma, and the same people may also respond differently, depending on the area of social behaviour in which that general challenge is posed. Chapters 7 and 8 have focused on this last source of diversity.

In what follows below, we try to bring order into the diversity of responses, by interpreting the data in light of the environmental ethos. Taking up the suggestions of chapter 2, we argue in some detail about how the environmental ethos can be decomposed into two cumulative stages, the first stage concerning the ‘internalization of environmental value’, and the second stage concerning the ‘internalization of personal responsibility’.