Infinite Responsibility - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 130

when we atempt to do justice in the midst of the ruins. Once irrevers-
ible, severe climate change arrives, once the domain of indifferent events
sweep away nearly every positive consequence that might arise from our
actions, what could possibly inspire us to be just?
Our only choice in that case would be to abandon all reference to
the future—a future for ourselves, for others, or for the biosphere itself.
Although I argued earlier in this topic that nearly every action we take is
grounded on our orientation to the future, under the unrelenting pres-
sure of severe climate change we would have to construct an ethics that
has no such orientation, that takes its inspiration from a radically dif-
ferent resource. We would have to adopt an ethics that would no lon-
ger have for its ultimate basis a belief that just action would necessarily
lead to an eventual good for ourselves or others or a material benefit that
might actually arrive. Adopting such an ethics, we would enact justice
for another purpose entirely—one realized in the act itself. We would
respond to others without calculating whether our action would pay off
in the long run, without measuring our action according to the demands
of a realistic common sense, accepting the possibility that our actions
may have no results that would ever be visible to us or to others. In effect,
we would accept a responsibility that would be infinite in still another
sense—one that would bear upon us beyond all pragmatic, finite consid-
erations, aiming for a good that is valuable in itself—a good visible, per-
haps, only in our intention, in our sense of a justice without which the
value of all action disappears. 124
An ethics of this kind—an ethics in extremis— can endure nearly any
circumstance. In the midst of disaster, where pragmatic action may fail
us, where grief itself must run aground, when all the familiar scenarios
of daily life and of human emotion decay, we can still enact justice for its
own sake. If we act on these terms, we accept a world without redemp-
tion, whether religious or secular; giving up any appeal for a transcen-
dental solution, by the same token we release ourselves from a purely
material history, discovering instead our ability to do justice beyond all
calculation. From a certain point of view, it might seem that this mode of
justice would enact a caring that could not heal, a politics that could not
liberate, a hope that could not come to pass. Yet in fact, if we take action
whose benefits we cannot know, giving ourselves to what may never