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and tons of pollution that went into making all this possible—you might panic at the thought of your own hypocrisy. That’s what Radiohead seemed to do after they learned that their album Hail to the Thief—the CDs, the travelling of the band members, and especially the fans driving to the venues—put nearly eight tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That’s roughly the amount 1,400 cars would emit in a year. To offset and reabsorb that amount, some fifty thousand trees would have to be planted and maintained for a hundred years (if there’s that much time left).

The band’s response, it turns out, was fairly progressive—not only environmentally, but also philosophically. For environmental ethics has lately become less preoccupied with specific environmental problems (How risky is nuclear power?, say) and more interested in a virtue-centered approach. Rather than focusing on individual environmental problems, virtue ethicists focus on broader questions, like “How ought we to live?”, “What constitutes human flourishing?” and “What are the relative roles of humans and their (non-human) environment in answering these questions?” An enormous benefit of this approach is the framing of environmental issues as essential to the good life, rather than some burden we must shoulder out of necessity. Radiohead has embraced a virtue-centered approach to environmental issues and actually addresses this relationship between humanity and nature. The band has in fact become a moral exemplar, a model for living more in harmony with nature and promoting human flourishing that we can all look up to. (And not just because “anyone can play guitar.”)

Kid Akrasia

Radiohead and Yorke as a solo artist are not the first to engage political and environmental issues, of course. Classic protest songs like Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” (1962), and Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” (1962) established a tradition in modern pop music that extends through Eminem’s “Mosh” or “White America” and Green Day’s Grammy-winning album “American Idiot.”

Specifically environmental issues were put on the map by Woody Guthrie, who dedicated an entire album to songs about the Columbia River (anchored by the song “Roll on Columbia!”), and have continued with songs like Ani DiFranco’s “Animal” and Dar Williams’ “What Do You Love More than Love.” Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief has some things to say about a certain American president, while Thom Yorke’s The Eraser goes to the heart of current worries about global warming. The album is anxious, its lyrics are desperate, and the album cover artwork imagery of King Canute trying to hold back a giant wave is an obvious metaphor of our struggle to control something that is “. . . relentless, Invisible, Indefatigable, Indisputable, Undeniable” (as Yorke sings in “And It Rained All Night).

In order for these environmental messages to be taken seriously, though, we must believe that the artists behind them take them seriously as well. This points to a deeper moral question first addressed by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics (Book 7, Chapter 3). It involves the idea of akrasia or weakness of will, a form of moral weakness. Those that fall victim to akrasia act in ways that contradict their better judgment. Simply put, one ought to act in accordance with reason or risk acting immorally. If I chose a over b, even though I’m convinced that b was the better thing to do all things considered then I’ve certainly engaged in puzzling, potentially immoral behavior.

Take the artist Sting, for example. Much has been made of his politics and his failure to adhere to his own message. In one interview, Sting and his wife Trudie Styler were confronted by a journalist charging that he and his wife have a carbon footprint nearly thirty times greater than the average Britain. Sting said, “I’m a musician; I have a huge carbon footprint.” Apparently, he is also friendly to less than environmentally responsible business ventures. In 1995, he accepted a reported £500,000 to advertise the Seagaia golf complex in Japan,