(Rappler now has a paywall/a sign-in requirement so I’m reposting this here because I believe so hard in widening the reach. This was originally posted in October 2023.)
I’ve been in Edinburgh for close to two months now, and despite its beauty, being outdoors has been slowly losing its appeal. I went for a 10-km fun run on Sunday and it wasn’t until the sixth kilometer mark that my limbs finally loosened up, the 4C degree Scottish autumns making it difficult for my lungs, used to the tropics, to process oxygen. It’s been good, though; on the rare times the weather is beautiful, I go hiking and running; other times, I make art, go bouldering, or tinker in the kitchen.
I’ve also been rewatching The Good Place.
What do we owe each other?
The Good Place, to the uninitiated (though please, watch it if you can) centers around four humans who have passed, and asks questions – and provides no answers – on what happens after we die. Eventually, further on into the show, it asks, “How can we become good people?”
Chidi Anagonye, one of the protagonists, was a professor of ethics and moral philosophy on Earth, and has brought to the afterlife his goal of arriving at fundamental truths, including on how one becomes a good person. In one of the episodes, he brings up T.M. Scanlon’s book, What We Owe to Each Other, where Scanlon asserts that a good life is dependent on “the positive value of a way of living with others,” that there are rules that we should follow, and that these rules will go on forever. This theory, known as contractualism, proposes that we have mutual obligations to one another, that, if fulfilled, allow us to become good people.
The thing is, however, it is no small feat to choose to do good every day. It’s even harder to remind ourselves that we owe each other something, perhaps multiple somethings. It’s hardest to want to do good, and remain good, when the circumstances around us make it difficult – because we have other things to do, because sometimes it’s just easier to be selfish, or because sometimes, the attempt towards goodness just feels futile. Chidi, in a lecture, provided insight into these hesitations; he said, “I argue that we choose to be good because of our bonds with other people and our innate desire to treat them with dignity. Simply put, we are not in this alone.”
The value of solidarity
This is the very treatise within which the climate justice sphere evolves. It is the decision every day to fight for a more just world because it’s what we owe each other.
We owe it to each other to fight for lives with dignity, to raise our opposition to oppressive policies, to uplift the calls of those whose voices have historically been marginalized. We owe it to each other to look within our own backyards, check our privilege, and see how we have gained (intentionally or otherwise) from injustice, and find ways to rectify things and create pockets of justice amid a very unjust, often violent, world.
We owe it to each other to look at the benefits we reap for ourselves, and the burdens that we allocate to others. We owe it to each other to lessen those burdens, even if it means decreasing our benefits. We owe each other a good life.
We owe it to each other to think about our words and our actions, again and again, and twice over.
This doesn’t mean we no longer fight or push back. This is another thing we owe each other.
We owe it to each other to call out against injustice when it is in front of us, but also, importantly, when it is far beyond our reach – injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We owe it to each other, to indigenous peoples whose lands are degraded and cultures erased, to local communities whose livelihoods are at the mercy of conglomerates, to islanders whose homes will be swept away by tides, to the youth and children and unborn who will inherit a burning world unless we act on what we owe each other. We owe it to each other to call out Global North countries and remind them of their responsibility to pay, the same way we owe it to Global South countries and allies to stand shoulder to shoulder with them as they strive to create a better world.
We owe it to each other in massive methods, in great decisions, in big magnitudes. We also owe it to each other in small, daily, rudimentary ways.
The difficulty of choosing every day
Many philosophers and writers and dreamers have talked about how to be a good person, how to have hope amidst political and climate crises, how to get over the feeling of doom. David Foster Wallace, one of my favorite authors, talked about how to live a compassionate life in his fundamental piece (and speech) “This is Water.” The Good Place also did the same thing. Both of them had the same reminder – get out of your head and do the difficult, mundane, conscious thing of choosing to do good every day.
Even then, it won’t be easy. Even then, things will come in the way – deadlines, to-dos, hopelessness at routine. But we have to do it anyway.
And is this how we become good people? Is this how we solve the existential environmental crisis looming over us? I don’t know. I only know a few things – that the planet will continue to exist well after us, that the sun will continue to rise and fall, that the moon will keep chasing the sun, and that really, all we have is one another. And even when it seems like the world’s problems are massive to the extreme (they are), and when it seems like all hope is lost (it’s not), Eleanor Shellstrop, the main character, has a reminder, “I think we have one move left: We can try.”
This is what we owe each other, and perhaps, this is how we create a better, more just world. – Rappler.com
Joy Reyes is a climate justice lawyer affiliated with the Manila Observatory and the Legal Rights and Natural Resources Center. She’s currently in Scotland taking up her MSc in Global Environment, Politics, and Society at the University of Edinburgh.
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Of perpetual finds 