Appealing to Emotions in Environmental Campaigns: Empathy, Awe, Wonder, and Fear

Abstract

Environmental campaigns today frequently appeal to a range of emotions we experience in our engagement with the nonhuman world. While such emotions have received increasing attention in psychology, the philosophical literature on emotions has largely been limited to emotions in a social, interpersonal context. In this thesis, I aim to fill this gap by asking what emotions we should appeal to in environmental campaigns. I begin by suggesting that our goals in environmental campaigns should be diverse: we should aim not only to motivate right actions, but also to improve value judgments and cultivate virtues. I then look at four emotions that are important in existing environmental campaigns, namely, empathy, awe, wonder, and fear. I suggest that it is beneficial to appeal to a mix of empathy, awe, and wonder. This is not only because they make us care about different nonhuman entities, but also because doing so can ameliorate some of the issues we encounter when only appealing to one emotion. I further suggest that we should limit the appeals to fear in environmental campaigns, because they are likely to lead to disengagement in most environmental issues, and have a negative impact on the audience’s wellbeing, rational capacity, and ability to experience some other emotions like empathy and awe. I conclude by reflecting on the complexity of my answer to the question of what emotions we should appeal to in environmental campaigns. Because there is a diverse range of valuable objects in the environment, as well as a diverse range of goals in environmental campaigns (that are sometimes in conflict), such complexity is inevitable in any serious attempt to answer the question.