Several climate ethicists have recently argued that having children is morally equivalent to over-consumption, and contributes greatly to parents’ personal carbon footprints. We show that these claims are mistaken, for two reasons. First, including procreation in parents’ carbon footprints double-counts children’s consumption emissions, once towards their own, and once towards their parents’ footprints. We show that such double-counting defeats the chief purpose of the concept of carbon footprint, namely to measure the sustainability and equitability of one’s activities and choices. Furthermore, (...) we show that proposals to avoid double-counting have other unacceptable implications. Second, we show that the key arguments for a supposed moral equivalence of procreation and consumption overgenerate and lead to unacceptable consequences in many cases, such as for the work of doctors who save lives or enable procreation. Finally, we propose that rather than counting children’s emissions towards their parents’ carbon footprints, we should consider these emissions as part of the parents’ carbon impact, i.e. the difference that their choices make to the overall global carbon emissions. It is from the perspective of impact that we should think about the ethics of procreation in an age of climate change. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Stefansson (forthcoming) argues that by emitting and offsetting, we fail to fulfil our justice-based duty to avoid harm owed to specific individuals. In this paper, I explore a case where offsetting fails to prevent some but not all risks of harms that our emissions impose on them. By drawing on a distinction between general and specific duties not to (risk) harm, I argue that if by emitting and offsetting, we satisfy some (if not all) of our specific duties we (...) owe others, then this gives us stronger moral reasons to offset than give to charities that do good more effectively. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the relation between Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) estimates, abatement cost analyses, and individual climate duties. I first highlight the stakes that SCC and abatement cost estimates potentially have for the content of individual duties to either pay the full or fair cost of their carbon emissions, or offset the volume of their emissions. I survey four methodological options (a minimalist approach, a precautionary approach, an averaging approach, and what I call a ‘sufficiency-bounded’ precautionary approach) (...) for conceptualizing the terrain of individual duties in light of SCC and abatement cost estimates that are both contentious and evolving. (shrink)

The free choice of the number of offspring is a fundamental right, emphasised for instance by the eighth principle of the 1994 UN Cairo Conference. The idea of a population policy advocated „with coercion“ is frowned upon by churches and many NGOs. But does this policy have to be implemented with „coercion“ or are incentives enough? And where are the boundaries between constraints and incentives? The following article addresses these philosophical questions. We are recklessly ignoring the adjusting screw of population (...) policy, should also fight politically for international incentives against an increase in population and must think about population policy in our own country, where the ecological footprints are large. (shrink)

This article argues that parents have a special, shared duty to organize for collective action on climate change mitigation and adaptation, but not for the reason one might assume. The apparently obvious reason is that climate change threatens life, health and community for the next generation, and parents have a special duty to their children to protect their basic human interests. This argument fails because many parents could protect their children from these central harms without taking more general action to (...) combat climate change, let alone to mitigate it. Instead, subtler reasons are advanced, drawing on children’s relational interests or on their interests as moral agents. It is argued that parents owe it to their children to combat climate change because of the indirect impact on current children of serious threats to their children and grandchildren, and of being required to live in a radically unjust world. It is further argued that parents may owe it directly to their more distant descendants to mitigate climate change because of the role current parents played in bringing them into the world. (shrink)

I consider cases where you increase the risk that, e.g., someone will die, without increasing the risk that you will kill them: in particular, cases in which that increasing of risk is accompanied by a decreasing of risk of the same degree such that the risk imposition has been offset. I defend the moral legitimacy of such offsetting, including carbon-offsetting.

The topic of my thesis is individual and collective responsibility for collectively caused systemic harms, with climate change as the case study. Can an individual be responsible for these harms, and if so, how? Furthermore, what does it mean to say that a collective is responsible? A related question, and the second main theme, is how ignorance and knowledge affect our responsibility. -/- My aim is to show that despite the various complexities involved, an individual can have responsibility to address (...) climate change. I argue that climate change is not a problem just for states and international bodies, but also for individuals. There are three possible sources of moral responsibility for individuals in relation to climate change harms: direct responsibility (individuals qua individuals), shared responsibility as members (individuals qua members of collective agents), and shared responsibility as constituents (individuals qua constituents of unorganised collectives). -/- Accounts that deny individual responsibility fail to either take our interdependent reality seriously or fail to understand marginal participation (or in the case direct responsibility, fail to appreciate the nature of the climate change phenomenon). Individuals can be complicit in climate change harms, either as members of collective agents (e.g. as citizens of states or employees of a corporation) or as constituents of unorganised collectives (e.g. as consumers or polluters). -/- Although I focus on individual complicity, I do not deny the obligations of collective agents. However, nation-states, governments, and international bodies are not the only relevant collective agents in climate ethics: other collective agents, such as corporations, matter also and can have obligations concerning making sure that their activities are as carbon-neutral as possible. In addition, those corporations that have engaged in lobbying against climate regulation through creating and disseminating misleading information have acquired themselves additional obligations to mitigate climate change and compensate for the harm they have caused. Even so, the ethical claims can only be understood by individual members of these collective agents because only they can feel the pull of moral claims. I suggest that we could distinguish between what one must possess in order to be capable of making moral claims (i.e. moral agency conditions), and what it means to have the ability to exhibit such claims through one’s conduct. -/- Individual direct responsibility is to not to increase the probable risk of serious harm to other people, at least as long as we can do so at a less than significant cost to ourselves. It is limited to relatively wealthy individuals. Offsetting is not a reliable way to meet this duty; we need to look at the emissions from our lifestyle choices (within the available infrastructure). Shared responsibility qua members of collective agents is the key individual responsibility, and it presses especially on those occupying key positions within key collective agents. Saying that, our shared responsibility qua constituents of unorganised collectives has the potential to be decisive in whether some action is taken or not, either through a set of actions that can signal certain acceptance or support, or as a form of political support from the grass roots. (shrink)

It is typically wrong to act in a way that foreseeably makes some impending harm worse. Sometimes it is permissible to do so, however, if one also offsets the harm increasing action by doing something that decreases the badness of the same harm by at least as much. This chapter argues that the standard deontological constraint against doing harm is not compatible with the permissibility of harm increases that have been offset. Offsetting neither prevents one's other actions from doing harm (...) nor ensures that the harm those actions do is made permissible by any of the constraint's familiar provisos. To make sense of offsetting, the old constraint against doing harm should be replaced with a new constraint against making unoffset harm increases. The chapter discusses how to formulate the new constraint so that it can handle both the offsetting cases that the old constraint gets wrong as as well as the non-offsetting cases that the old constraint gets right. Adopting this constraint against unoffset harm increases may have important implications both for theoretical questions about the sources of deontological constraints as well as for practical questions, such as whether buying carbon offsets can make emitting carbon dioxide permissible. (shrink)