A philosophical puzzle can help explain why some people and governments aren’t acting quickly enough to tackle climate change.
In 1990, American philosopher Warren Quinn posed the puzzle of the self-torturer. Imagine you’ve had an electrical device fitted to you. It has a dial, and every week you’re offered £10,000 to turn that dial up a notch. Doing this causes a tiny but permanent increase in electrical current flowing through your body, an increase you either can’t or can barely feel.
Each week, this seems like an excellent deal: a lot of money for (at worst) a negligible pain increase. But if you keep taking the money, the device will reach high settings and you’ll be full of agony and regret. It seems like you should stop at some point, but when?
Theories of self-torture vary, but many philosophers (including Quinn) agree that it’s a mistake to only consider each dial-turn in isolation. Instead, they claim the rational strategy is to consider the whole sequence, and perhaps employ some kind of decision procedure to pick a reasonable point and stop there.
I’d take £50,000 for an occasional ache in my arm. But there is some arbitrariness here, because rationality doesn’t tell us precisely when to stop. £40,000 or £60,000 would also be reasonable.
People pick goals or targets arbitrarily all the time, often settling on salient numbers. Eight hours sleep, not 7 hours 55 minutes; 2,000 calories not 2,003; 2°C of global warming. There may be scientific or other reasons for choosing roughly these numbers, but these reasons are often vague – not precise enough to forbid a small increase or decrease.
So how does this connect to climate change? In the example of self-torture, there’s a “clear and repeatable reason” to turn the dial (in Quinn’s words). And this reasoning is also commonplace about the climate.
The American philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong argues that global warming is not “my fault”. He imagines taking a gas-guzzling car for a drive for fun. The drive brings some pleasure and, in normal circumstances, causes no meaningful harm via the atmosphere. It’s a drop in the ocean, some might say.
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Canadian philosopher Chrisoula Andreou and others have noticed the similarities between environmental damage and self-torture. Every day people are offered food, flights and air conditioning in return for tiny increases in greenhouse gas levels. Each emission or turn of the dial is negligible in isolation, but taken together they have awful consequences: agony and a wrecked climate.
But if climate change is a version of Quinn’s thought experiment, it’s far more challenging than the original. The payoff is not just money. At present, some greenhouse gas emissions are essential to our lives. Much of our food, energy, flights and even medication currently rely on fossil fuels. Witness the surprisingly high emissions of gases commonly used in anaesthesia.
Overwhelm is real
Because our personal environmental footprints are negligible in a global context, many (including Sinnott-Armstrong) suggest climate change is a problem for governments, not citizens. Certainly, a government can determine health service policy, energy policy and so on.
But the challenge is bigger than that. The climate is so vast that even particular government policies can seemingly make no difference to the overarching crisis. The temptation to turn the dial recurs at a political and policy level too. This relates to us all in our role not as drivers (tempted to go for a drive) but as voters tempted to vote against fuel tax rises, for example.
As former UK prime minister Tony Blair wrote in a 2025 report by his thinktank, the Institute for Global Change: “In developed countries, voters feel they’re being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle when they know that their impact on global emissions is minimal.”
The puzzle of the self-torturer shows the truth in this claim. Many policies by themselves make no meaningful difference to the climate, but impose real sacrifices on citizens. If a small increase in British aviation taxes leads to fewer flights or even a regional airport closing, then some people will lose their jobs.
And even though air travel is one of the most carbon-intensive things most of us will ever do, one medium-sized country slightly reducing the number of flights in its territory will make negligible difference to the climate overall.
But the self-torture thought experiment shows why considering each policy in isolation like this is a mistake, just as it’s a mistake to consider every dial turn in isolation.
As many of us learn every new year, agreeing a goal is the easy part – not backsliding when trade-offs begin to bite is much harder. Even if we know that, just like eight hours of sleep, our agreed climate target is somewhat arbitrary and could have been a bit higher or lower, we should stick to it.
Much of the world has agreed to limit global warming. If the analogy with the puzzle of the self-torturer holds, then doing this requires that we – both individual people and governments – need to endure some painful sacrifices, even when they appear to have individually negligible benefits.
