RADICAL RESPONSIBILITY: SARTRE AND THE ECOCENTRIC EROSION OF HUMAN AGENCY

Abstract

Contemporary ecological crisis persists despite decades of environmental ethics discourse and rising public awareness, a discrepancy researchers have named the awareness-action gap. One influential corrective, running from Aldo Leopold’s land ethic through Arne Naess’s deep ecology, addresses anthropocentric domination by folding the human being back into the biotic community as one member among others. This article argues that such levelling, whatever its merits against domination, carries an underexamined cost: it erodes the very ground on which anyone can be held responsible for ecological destruction, since only a being capable of choice, not soil, water, or rock, can be asked to answer for what has happened to the world. Using conceptual philosophical analysis combined with close textual reading of Being and Nothingness, this article reconstructs Jean-Paul Sartre’s account of radical responsibility as a way through this impasse. Freedom-in-situation and the coefficient of adversity secure a subject who is neither an unconditioned master over nature nor dissolved into it, while responsibility as ontological structure, being the incontestable author of one’s acts, restores the human being’s answerability without restoring its arrogance. Sartre’s concept of bad faith further explains how this responsibility, though ontologically inescapable, is nonetheless evaded in practice, often through language that ecocentrism itself supplies, and indicates what closing the awareness-action gap would actually require.