Matthew Altman-Suchocki

Previous conceptualizations of virtue have failed to appreciate how virtuous behaviors can operate in the service of satisfying existential concerns. Integrating existential and positive psychological approaches to virtue, we introduce a new theoretical framework – the 4C Model of Virtue – which posits four interlocking aspects of virtue that are important to consider: (1) existential concerns, (2) culture, (3) context, and (4) calibration. First, people might be motivated to acquire virtues partly by a desire for existential security. Second, virtues are culturally embedded in, and their meaning, function, and manifestation vary by, culture. Third, virtues are affected by a host of contextual features, which moderate their expression and utility. Fourth, virtues must be appropriately calibrated, and their miscalibration can undermine, rather than promote, well-being, relational functioning, and flourishing. Working from positive existential psychology and connecting to existential philosophy, we discuss several testable hypotheses generated from our theorization to catalyze work in this area.

This paper’s main aim is to illuminate how climate activism—which seeks to address the collective existential crisis that is climate change—uniquely intersects with the individual existential crisis that is one’s own death. Addressing climate change seems to minimally require more cooperation and less environmentally unfriendly behavior. However, in virtue of the way discussions on climate change can make nature’s vulnerability—and, relatedly, our own mortality—psychologically salient, climate discourse is capable of engendering existential anxiety. This poses problems for climate activism, as attenuating existential anxiety often relies on forms of self-esteem striving capable of undermining cooperation and exacerbating environmentally unfriendly behavior. I take these problems to have implications for a certain style of discourse made famous by Greta Thunberg: climate shaming. Because of shame’s potential to induce moral maturation/motivational revision, some take climate shaming to be a justified strategy for promoting climate activism. Yet empirical research suggests that climate shaming may often catalyze various self-esteem striving behaviors that lead to the exact opposite of climate shaming’s intended effect(s). In my view, this is because of climate shaming’s problematic potential to engender existential anxiety. If so, climate activists have good reason to abandon the climate shaming strategy.