This article draws on the insight that people and communities have fundamental relationships with place. People are defined and shaped by place; and place is, in turn, defined and shaped by communi...

Notions of care for humans and more-than-humans appear at the margins of the sustainability transformations debate. This paper explores the merits of an ethics of care approach to sustainability tr...

The rise of the idea of the Anthropocene is promoting multiple reflections on its meaning. As we consider entering this new geological epoch, we realize the pervasiveness of humankind’s deconstruction and reconstruction of the Earth, in both geophysical and discursive terms. As the body of the Earth is marked and reshaped, so is its idea. From a hostile territory to be subjugated and exploited through sovereign commands, the Earth is now reframed as a vulnerable domain in need of protection. The (...) mode of sovereignty, which has accompanied human and legal history and practice during modernity and its project of mastery, is no longer useful. Humanity’s control of the Earth is being reimagined and reconfigured along biopolitical coordinates of thought and action. Biopolitics shifts the focus of power, changes its modalities of interventions, and rearticulates its legitimacy on the idea of taking responsibility for the Earth, for nature. A biopolitical re-orientation of law captures the fundamental aim of caring for nature, of fostering its vital possibilities and of enhancing its productive potential. Yet, biopolitics engulfs nature in its entirety under its framework of control, where protection and subjugation, vulnerability and productivity, life and death are constantly entangled in a reciprocal and inevitable relation of indistinguishability. Sovereignty becomes thus a key modality of biopolitical intervention, when nature is recalcitrant, wild, spontaneous, unpredictable, violent, dangerous. Biopolitics, thus, remains caught in an undecidable dilemma, where in order to protect the Earth, it must subjugate it; to save it, it must condemn it. In this respect, biopolitics remains utterly modern, or as argued by Roberto Esposito, modernity has always been biopolitical, insofar as modernity has emerged as a framework for the protection of life against life’s own excesses. But how can we escape the biopolitical reframing and enframing of the Earth and its total subsumption under its matrix of control? How can we rethink the encounter between law and nature without remaining entangled in the aporetic dilemma of biopolitics? An aesthetics of wonder may offer a way. (shrink)

Climate change is undeniably a global problem, but the situation is especially dire for countries whose territory is comprised entirely or primarily of low-lying land. While geoengineering might offer an opportunity to protect these states, international consensus on the particulars of any geoengineering proposal seems unlikely. To consider the moral complexities created by unilateral deploy- ment of geoengineering technologies, we turn to a moral convention with a rich history of assessing interference in the sovereign affairs of foreign states: the just (...) war tradition. We argue that the just war framework demonstrates that, for these nations, geoengineering offers a justified form of self-defense from an unwar- ranted, albeit unintentional, aggression. This startling result places our own car- bon-emitting activities in a stark new light: in perpetrating climate change, we are, in fact, waging war on the most vulnerable. (shrink)

Indigenous peoples are referenced at various times in communication, debates, and academic and policy discussions on geoengineering. The discourses I have in mind f...

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)

Despite the substantial research into the peculiar political and legal status of climate migrants, there is comparatively little exploration of the particular forms of loss such migrants might face or how efforts might mitigate such loss. This paper aims to begin filling that void by characterizing such loss, using the framework of the UNFCC’s Warsaw Mechanism, as agential harm. Using existing models for thinking about the preservation of values and links with the past, I aim to use this idea of (...) a threat to agency to discuss how migration could occur to better preserve the agential control of displaced populations. (shrink)

The evidence is overwhelming that members of particularly wealthy and industry-owning segments of Western societies have much larger carbon footprints than most other humans, and thereby contribute far more than their “fair share” to the enormous problem of climate change. Nonetheless, in this paper we shall counsel against a strategy focused primarily on blaming and shaming and propose, instead, a change in the ethical conversation about climate change. We recommend a shift in the ethical framework from a focus on the (...) role of individual agents and a conversation about guilt; in its place, we propose a relational approach to public health ethics that is centered around the idea of relational solidarity. We begin by briefly reviewing the most common—and woefully inadequate—approach in the West to reducing emissions and responding to the health-related impacts of climate change. We then go on to propose a relational approach to public health ethics as an alternative ethical framework that better fits the moral problems associated with climate change and holds promise for a more meaningful response. (shrink)

A consensus is building that our planet has entered the so-called age of the Anthropocene—a post-Holocene epoch defined by the significant impact of humans on geological, biotic and climatic planetary processes. On the one hand, there is good reason to exercise caution in relation to this concept of the “Age of Man.” At a time when immoderate anthropogenic impact poses a serious threat to ecological integrity and balance, calling an epoch after ourselves does not necessarily demonstrate the humility we may (...) need to espouse. Moreover, discourses of the Anthropocene risk overwriting important differences among human.. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that although it is important to attend to injustices surrounding women's epistemic exclusions, it is equally important to attend to injustices surrounding women's epistemic inclusions. Partly in response to the historical exclusion of women's knowledge, there has been increasing effort among first-world actors to seek out women's knowledge. This trend is apparent in efforts to mainstream gender in climate change negotiation. Here, one is told that women's superior knowledge about how to adapt to climate change (...) makes them “poised to help solve and overcome this daunting challenge.” Pulling from the work of Miranda Fricker, I argue that such claims risk epistemically objectifying women. To illuminate the risk of women's epistemic objectification in climate change discourse, I offer a feminist analysis of current efforts to seek women's environmental knowledge, cautioning throughout that such efforts must reflect just epistemic relations. (shrink)

Indigenous peoples must adapt to current and coming climate-induced environmental changes like sea-level rise, glacier retreat, and shifts in the ranges of important species. For some indigenous peoples, such changes can disrupt the continuance of the systems of responsibilities that their communities rely on self-consciously for living lives closely connected to the earth. Within this domain of indigeneity, some indigenous women take seriously the responsibilities that they may perceive they have as members of their communities. For the indigenous women who (...) have such outlooks, responsibilities that they assume in their communities expose them to harms stemming from climate change impacts and other environmental changes. Yet at the same time, their commitment to these responsibilities motivates them to take on leadership positions in efforts at climate change adaptation and mitigation. I show why, at least for some indigenous women, this is an important way of framing the climate change impacts that affect them. I then argue that there is an important implication in this conversation for how we understand the political responsibilities of nonindigenous parties for supporting distinctly indigenous efforts at climate change adaptation and mitigation. (shrink)

Geoengineering has been broadly and helpfully defined as “the intentional manipulation of the earth's climate to counteract anthropogenic climate change or its warming effects” (Corner and Pidgeon , 26). Although there exists a rapidly growing literature on the ethics of geoengineering, very little has been written about its gender dimensions. The authors consider four contexts in which geoengineering appears to have important gender dimensions: (1) the demographics of those pushing the current agenda, (2) the overall vision of control it involves, (...) (3) the design of the particular technologies, and (4) whom geoengineering will most affect and benefit. After detailing these four gender dimensions, we consider three ways in which the geoengineering discourse could be enriched if it became more sensitive to issues of gender. These include increasing the focus on the concrete other, recognizing the socially transformative potential of geoengineering technologies, and engaging in value-sensitive design. Although ultimately remaining agnostic on the desirability of geoengineering, the paper brings gender considerations into a discussion from which they have been conspicuously absent. (shrink)

Environmental justice seeks fairness in how environmental burdens and risks are visited on poor people, women, communities of color, Indigenous peoples, minorities, and citizens of developing countries. It also concerns whether members of these same groups have fair access to environmental goods such as urban green spaces, forested areas, and clean water. Environmental goods extend, also, to opportunities to benefit from enterprises such as tourism and green infrastructure (Shrader-Frechette 2002; Bullard 2000; Taylor 2000; Whyte 2010). The moral wrongs characteristic of (...) environmental injustices often do not resonate with members of dominant societies. In some cases, those injustices are unknowable. To say that .. (shrink)

In this paper I engage interdisciplinary conversation on inaction as the dominant response to climate change, and develop an analysis of the specific phenomenon of complacency through a critical-feminist lens. I suggest that Chris Cuomo's discussion of the “insufficiency” problem and Susan Sherwin's call for a “public ethics” jointly point toward particularly promising harm-reduction strategies. I draw upon and extend their work by arguing that extant philosophical accounts of complacency are inadequate to the task of sorting out what it means (...) to be complacent on climate change. I offer a sketch for an alternative account, which I take to be a start in the direction of mapping out a diverse array of “motivational vices” that need to be named, grappled with, and remedied. (shrink)

I focus on North America, a locale with nations financially well-situated to avoid the worst of climate change harms for the longest duration through financial buttressing (at least for a subset of the population). Environmental action is often taken when one is affected negatively in direct and concrete ways. It is therefore unfortunate that populations with the most fiscal and political power have the greatest ability to avoid the sorts of environmental harm that pragmatically necessitate an immediate and comprehensive response. (...) Within North America I focus my analysis on the population whose job it is to advance moral theory, namely practicing ethicists. I also focus on their students—those intellectually .. (shrink)

We present three rights-based approaches to research and policies on gender justice and equity in the context of climate change adaptation. After a short introduction, we describe the dominant discourse that frames climate change and provide an overview of the literature that has depicted women both as vulnerable victims of climatic change and as active agents in adaptive responses. Discussion follows on the shift from gendered impacts to gendered adaptive capacities and embodied experiences, highlighting the continuing impact of social biases (...) and institutional practices that shape unequal access to and control over household and community decision-making processes undermining timely, fair, and successful adaptive responses. Assessment of rights-based frameworks considers the space they provide in addressing persistent gender and other inequalities, at different political and operational scales. We argue that a human security framework is useful to fill the gap in current gender and climate justice work, particularly when implemented through the entry point of adaptive social protection. Gender justice in climate change adaptation is an obligation for transformational social change, not just rights. The time is ripe to replace narrow-minded vulnerability studies with a contextualized understanding of our mutual fragility and a commitment to enhanced livelihood resilience, worldwide. (shrink)

This volume bridges contemporary philosophical conceptions of risk and responsibility and offers an extensive examination of the topic. It shows that risk and responsibility combine in ways that give rise to new philosophical questions and problems. Philosophical interest in the relationship between risk and responsibility continues to rise, due in no small part due to environmental crises, emerging technologies, legal developments, and new medical advances. Despite such interest, scholars are just now working out how to conceive of the links between (...) risk and responsibility, the implications that risks may have to conceptions of responsibility (and vice versa), as well as how such theorizing might play out in applied cases. With contributions from leading scholars, this volume brings together new work examining the interplay between risk and responsibility, exploring its varied philosophical aspects and applications to contemporary issues in law, bioethics, technology, and environmental ethics. Risk and Responsibility in Context will be of interest to philosophers working in ethics, bioethics, philosophy of law, and philosophy of technology, as well as scholars and practitioners in law, health and science management, public policy, and environmental studies. (shrink)

: What would constitute just representation for the climate vulnerable? My purpose in this essay is to provide a critique of the default frame for approaching this question, as well as to offer a suggestion for expanding our conception of what an adequate answer should include. The standard frame conceives of representing vulnerable climate interests largely in terms of formal mechanisms of representation in technocratic and bureaucratic institutions. I show the limits of that standard approach and caution against the discussion (...) of climate representation being overly confined to the level of “formal” representation. I go on to detail the importance of thinking about more “informal” modes of representing vulnerable climate interests. In order to pursue both of these aims, I draw on lessons in meaningful representation and inclusion during postconflict peacebuilding. (shrink)

The relationship between knowledge, belief, and ethics is an inaugural theme in philosophy; more recently, under the title “ethics of belief” philosophers have worked to develop the appropriate methodology for studying the nexus of epistemology, ethics, and psychology. The title “ethics of belief” comes from a 19th-century paper written by British philosopher and mathematician W.K. Clifford. Clifford argues that we are morally responsible for our beliefs because each belief that we form creates the cognitive circumstances for related beliefs to follow, (...) and we inevitably influence each other through those beliefs. This study argues that recent cognitive research supports Cliffordian insights regarding patterns of belief formation and social influence. From the confirmation offered by such research, it follows that informational accuracy holds serious ethical significance in public discourse. Although scientific and epistemological matters are not always thought to be linked to normative morality, this study builds on Clifford's initial insights to show their linkage is fundamental to inquiry itself. In turn, Clifford's ethical and epistemic outline can inform a framework grounded in “public reason” under which seemingly opposed science communication strategies are philosophically united. With public discourse on climate change as the key example, empirically informed and grounded strategies for science communication in the public sphere are considered. (shrink)

The political representation of future generations would change the relationship between public decisions and the members of democratic political systems. In this paper we examine the implication of these changes on the responsibility of the living members for the future effects of current polices with special reference to climate change. The claim defended is that the collective responsibility of the living members for future outcomes diminishes when public decisions are made less responsive to them. In order to explain why this (...) is the case a ‘participatory account' of collective responsibility is developed according to which collective responsibility is premised on the extent to which public decisions depend on their members. The paper concludes with a discussion on the grounds for valuing collective outcome responsibility and why the conflict between this norm and the claim that future generations should be granted political representation poses fundamental questions about the value of democracy. (shrink)

ABSTRACTGiven the existing inequities in climate change, any proposed climate engineering strategy to solve the climate problem must meet a high threshold for justice. In contrast to an overly thin paradigm for justice that demands only a science-based assessment of potential temperature-related benefits and harms, we argue for the importance of attention to recognitional justice. Recognitional justice, we go on to claim, calls for a different type of assessment tool. Such an assessment would pay attention to neglected considerations such as (...) relationships, context, power, vulnerability, narrative, and affect. Here we develop a care-ethics related tool for assessing the justice of climate engineering with stratospheric aerosols, and suggest that qualitative social science methods may be required for its effective application. We illustrate the use of this tool with a case study involving interviews about stratospheric aerosol injection conducted in Kenya, the Solomon Islands... (shrink)

This paper addresses an apparent dilemma that must be resolved in order to respond ethically to global climate change. The dilemma can be presented as follows. Responding ethically to global climate change requires technological innovation that is accessible to everyone, including inhabitants of the least developed countries. Technological innovation, according to many, requires strong intellectual property protection, but strong intellectual property protection makes it highly unlikely that patent-protected technologies will be accessible to developing countries at affordable prices. Given this, responding (...) ethically to global climate change is highly unlikely. I argue that this apparent dilemma – which I call ‘the patent dilemma in global climate change’ – should be taken seriously. I discuss a number of possibilities for resolving it, and I argue that any acceptable strategy must satisfy the criteria of near-term feasibility and non-paternalism. Finally, I propose a multi-pronged, multi-tiered strategy that meets these conditions. (shrink)

There is a growing movement advocating for using closed border policies as a tool for solving the climate crisis. On this view, which I call the green border argument, fighting climate change requires drastic reductions in the global population and/or per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, immigration into high-income countries—particularly from low-income countries—increases per capita emissions while leaving the population untouched. Therefore, the green border theorist argues, we should limit entry into high-income countries. I explain why this is a (...) mistake and why the political left should embrace a pro climate and pro migrant politic. -/- First, the argument significantly overstates the impact of immigration on global GHG emissions. Second, the progressive green border argument is normatively incoherent. It advocates for closing borders and eliminating poverty and other rights violations in sending countries. However, given the relationship between emissions and income, this argument would require rejecting all poverty reduction strategies—a conclusion the progressive theorist wants to avoid. Third, the argument is counterproductive. An open border politic better promotes climate justice. A key reason is that high-income countries perceive immigration to be one of the most serious short- and medium- term costs of climate change. Whereas closure allows them to avoid this “cost,” open borders would force them to eliminate push factors, incentivizing global adaptation and mitigation strategies. Moreover, a closed border politic creates divisions between those affected, undermining cross-border solidarity and contributing to the perception that environmentalism is a white, middle-class movement. (shrink)

In the following paper, I connect Levinas’s notions of il y a and hypostasis to nature as alterity via Sallis’s interpretation of nature in its return. I interpret Levinas’s idea of the elemental as an unpossessable milieu, an excess with indirect traces, indicating alterity, something strange. I then turn to Levinas’s idea of the ruin of representation to argue for a contextual reversal in which meaning arises from the non-human other. This reversal uncovers the possibility of understanding non-human things as (...) existents, sites where nature in its return reveals the need for respect of the other—an ethical Sinngebung. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I argue that an account of epistemic injustice sensitive to interlocking oppressions must take us beyond injustice to human knowers. Although several feminist epistemologists argue for the incorporation of all forms of oppression into their analyses, feminist epistemology remains for the most part an anthropocentric enterprise. Yet insofar as a reduction to animal irrationality has been central to the epistemic injustice of both humans and animals, I propose that in addition to axes of gender, race, class and (...) sex, feminist epistemology must register the animal-human dichotomy as a fundamental driving mechanism inherent in epistemic injustice. From the perspective of a truly liberatory epistemology, I thus argue for an expanded account of epistemic injustice that is both 1) sufficiently attentive to the way injustices to human knowers continue to rely on animal oppression and 2) that accommodates epistemic injustices against animal knowers. (shrink)

In the dominant “climate change” imaginary, this phenomenon is distant and abstracted from our experiences of weather and the environment in the privileged West. Moreover, climate change discourse is saturated mostly in either neoliberal progress narratives of controlling the future or sustainability narratives of saving the past. Both largely obfuscate our implication therein. This paper proposes a different climate change imaginary. We draw on feminist new materialist theories—in particular those of Stacy Alaimo, Claire Colebrook, and Karen Barad—to describe our relationship (...) to climate change as one of “weathering.” We propose the temporal frame of “thick time”—a transcorporeal stretching between present, future, and past—in order to reimagine our bodies as archives of climate and as making future climates possible. In doing so, we can rethink the temporal narratives of climate change discourse and develop a feminist ethos of responsivity toward climatic phenomena. This project reminds us that we are not masters of the climate, nor are we just spatially “in” it. As weather-bodies, we are thick with climatic intra-actions; we are makers of climate-time. Together we are weathering the world. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Stephen Gardiner’s A Perfect Moral Storm offers an in-depth analysis of the ethical facets of climate change. In this paper, I contend that he nonetheless overlooks an important structural layer to climate vulnerabilities and injustices because he analyzes them implicitly interactional. I argue that climate change should rather be understood as a form of structural injustice as outlined by Iris M. Young. In this reading, the unjust socio-economic structural processes that give rise to climate change, the production and consumption (...) of fossil fuel energy, are at their core marked by (i) oppressive and dominating power relations that position agents (ii) intersecting with other structural constraints. Crucially, (iii) these structural processes arose historically, persist over time, and entrench the burden on those suffering in the future. This viewpoint improves our understanding of how the climate crisis unfolds over time in a way that augments Gardiner’s analysis. The structural approach can advance the climate justice debate both theoretically and practically. (shrink)