Written both for general readers and college students, Dialogues on Climate Justice provides an engaging philosophical introduction to climate justice, and should be of interest to anyone wanting to think seriously about the climate crisis. -/- The story follows the life and conversations of Hope, a fictional protagonist whose life is shaped by a terrifyingly real problem: climate change. From the election of Donald Trump in 2016 until the 2060s, the book documents Hope’s discussions with a diverse cast of characters. (...) As she ages, her conversations move from establishing the nature of the problem, to engaging with climate skepticism, to exploring her own climate responsibilities, through managing contentious international negotiations, to considering big technological fixes, and finally, as an older woman, to reflecting with her granddaughter on what one generation owes another. Following a philosophical tradition established by Plato more than two thousand years ago, these dialogues are not only philosophically substantive and carefully argued, but also distinctly human. The differing perspectives on display mirror those involved in real-world climate dialogues going on today. (shrink)

Human beings are the cause of many current environmental problems. This poses the question of how to respond to these problems at the national and international level. However, many people ask themselves whether they should personally contribute to solving these problems and how they could (best) do so. This is the focus of this Special Issue on Individual Environmental Responsibility. The introduction proposes a way to structure this complex debate by distinguishing three broad clusters of arguments. The first cluster tackles (...) the kind of ethical theory we need to properly address different aspects of individual responsibility. The second cluster asks what individuals should do from an ethical point of view. The third cluster investigates the role of contextual factors and the limits of demandingness in individual obligations. This introduction presents the papers of the Special Issue and the interrelations between them using those clusters of arguments as reference. (shrink)

Many pressing problems are of the following kind: some collection of actions of multiple people will produce some morally significant outcome (good or bad), but each individual action in the collection seems to make no difference to the outcome. These problems pose theoretical problems (especially for act-consequentialism), and practical problems for agents trying to figure out what they ought to do. Much recent literature on such problems has focused on whether it is possible for each action in such a collection (...) to make such a tiny impact on the world that it makes no expected difference to the outcomes with which we’re concerned. I argue that even if this is impossible, there are cases in which each action makes no difference, not because it has such a tiny effect on the world, but because if it were not performed, a similar action would be. This recognition allows us to connect these problems with discussions of structural injustice. (shrink)

Personal carbon footprints have become a subject of major concern among those who worry about global climate change. Conventional wisdom holds that individuals have a duty to reduce their impacts on the climate system by restricting their carbon footprints. However, I defend a new argument for thinking that this conventional wisdom is mistaken. Individuals, I argue, have a duty to take actions to combat the world’s problems. But since climate change is only one of a nearly endless list of such (...) problems, individuals’ obligations to take action as activists do not specifically require reductions in personal carbon footprints. Moreover, this is true even in spite of the fact that we are personally implicated in causing climate change. This paper also argues that many of those who decide to combat climate change by reducing their carbon footprints are likely doing more than they can justify in this regard. Although most people are not doing enough to combat world problems, a proper devotion to activism would seek a balance with other life demands that many climate activists currently eschew. (shrink)

A prominent argument in the climate ethical literature is that individual polluters are responsible for paying the costs of climate change.1 By contrast, I argue that we have reason to excuse individual agents morally for their contributions to climate change. This paper explores some of the possible constraints agents may face when they try to avoid harming the climate, constraints that might be acceptable reasons for excusing people’s contributions to climate change. Two lines of arguments are discussed. The first concerns (...) the soft internal constraint: that democratic citizens do not experience their individual failures as failures per se. In other words, they do not psychologically ‘feel’ they are doing anything wrong.2 The second argument concerns the soft external constraint: a number of studies have shown that many consumers report that while they are concerned about environmental issues, they struggle to translate their concern into green acts.3 Put differently, while individual citizens may think they are morally obliged to avoid harming the climate, they struggle to fulfill these obligations. I argue that these constraints do not constitute reasons for not blaming individual agents. Instead, individual agents can be morally excused for contributing to climate change because external constraints on agency make climate change a case of imperfect duty, that is, a duty that is hard to fulfill. (shrink)

How should responsibility be theorized in the context of the global climate crisis? This question is often framed through the language of distributive justice. Because of the inequitable distributi...

European Journal of Political Theory, Ahead of Print. How should responsibility be theorized in the context of the global climate crisis? This question is often framed through the language of distributive justice. Because of the inequitable distribution of historical emissions, climate vulnerability, and adaptation capacity, such considerations are necessary, but do not exhaust the question of responsibility. This article argues that climate change is a structural injustice demanding a theory of political responsibility. Agents bear responsibility not in virtue of their (...) individual causal contribution or capacity, but because they participate in and benefit from the carbon-intensive structures, practices, and institutions that constitute the global political and economic system. Agents take responsibility by engaging in collective political action to transform these structures that generate both climate hazards and unjust relationships of power. By incorporating distributive principles within a capacious conception of political responsibility, this framework advances the theory and practice of climate justice in two ways. First, adopting a relational rather than individualistic criterion of responsibility better makes sense of how and why individuals bear responsibility for a global and intergenerational injustice like climate change. Second, framing climate justice in terms of political responsibility for unjust structural processes better orients and motivates the political action necessary for structural transformation. (shrink)

Anthropogenic climate change threatens humanity as a whole, making its mitigation a matter of pressing concern. Mitigation efforts at the institutional level are necessary to successfully change the course of climate change, but thus far governments and industries have been ineffective at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. A point of philosophical contention is whether individuals have a moral responsibility to reduce their own emissions given the lack of institutional action. I argue that they do by redefining climate change as a collective (...) impact. Individual emitters share collective responsibility for that impact, which translates to an individual duty to reduce their contribution. (shrink)

Although climate change jeopardizes the fundamental human rights of current as well as future people, current actions and ambitions to tackle it are inadequate. There are two prominent explanations for this motivational gap in the climate ethics literature. The first maintains that our conventional moral judgement system is not well equipped to identify a complex problem such as climate change as an important moral problem. The second explanation refers to people’s reluctance to change their behaviour and the temptation to shirk (...) responsibility. We argue that both factors are at play in the motivational gap and that they are complemented by crucial moral psychological insights regarding moral disengagement, which enables emitters to dissociate self-condemnation from harmful conduct. In this way, emitters are able to maintain their profligate, consumptive lifestyle, even though this conflicts with their moral standards with respect to climate change. We provide some illustrations of how strategies of moral disengagement are deployed in climate change and discuss the relationship between the explanations for the motivational gap and moral disengagement. On the basis of this explanatory framework, we submit that there are three pathways to tackle the motivational gap and moral disengagement in climate change: making climate change more salient to emitters and affirming their self-efficacy; reconsidering the self-interested motives that necessitate moral disengagement; and tackling moral disengagement directly. (shrink)

Many have begun to despair that climate justice will prevail even in a minimal form. The affective dimensions of such despair, we suggest, threaten to make climate action appear too demanding. Thus, despair constitutes a moral challenge to individual climate action that has not yet received adequate attention. In response, we defend a duty to act in hope for a more just (climate) future. However, as we see it, this duty falls differentially upon the shoulders of more and less advantaged (...) agents in society. From arguments by Black thinkers like Derrick Bell, we draw a set of distinctions between two types of hope: one for ideal justice, and one for more modest change; and between two types of hopeful actions, those undertaken through formal political channels and those we call 'extra-political' actions; and between two sites of differential moral burdens, those of the privileged and those of the oppressed. Ours is a case for facing even bleak realities, demanding otherwise, and acting in hope to achieve a better future. (shrink)

This article substantiates the common intuition that it is wrong to contribute to dangerous climate change for no significant reason. To advance this claim, I first propose a basic principle that one has the moral obligation to act in accordance with the weight of moral reasons. I further claim that there are significant moral reasons for individuals not to emit greenhouse gases, as many other climate ethicists have already argued. Then, I assert that there are often no significant moral (or (...) excusing) reasons to emit greenhouse gases. In any such trivial-cost – but not necessarily trivial-impact – cases, the individual then has an obligation to refrain. Finally, I apply the moral weighing principle to everyday situations of emitting and establish two surprisingly substantial implications: the relevance of virtues to the interpersonal assessment of environmentally harmful actions and the extensive individual ethical obligations that exist short of moral purity. (shrink)

This article start from two opposing intuitions in the environmental duties debate. On the one hand, if our lifestyle causes environmental harm, then we have a duty to reduce that impact through lifestyle changes. On the other hand, many people share the intuition that environmental duties cannot demand to alter our lifestyle radically for environmental reasons. These two intuitions underlie the current dualism in the environmental duties debate: those arguing for lifestyle changes and those arguing that our duties are limited (...) to promoting just environmental institutions. The paper has two goals: first, to grasp the underlying reasons for the two intuitions, and, second, to provide a proposal that integrates both intuitions. The paper consists of two main parts. The first part examines the ‘our-duties-should-be-limited’ intuition. Two interpretations are discussed, one under the title ‘what I do make no difference’, dealing with causality and collective action, and one under the title ‘my duty cannot be to change my lifestyle completely’, which discusses demandingness, fairness and value conflict. The second part shows how the ‘lifestyle-matters’ intuition can still play an important role. This part consists of two sections, one on ‘how to make a difference’, which deals with the idea of a cooperative ethos, and the other with ‘why lifestyle matters’, discussing expressive rationality and integrity. These ideas allow giving an important place to lifestyle duties, while avoiding the possible counterproductive effect of a private duties account. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

In this paper I argue that individuals are, prior to the existence of just institutions requiring that they do so, bound as a matter of global distributive justice to restrict their use, or share the benefits fairly of any use beyond their entitlements, of the Earth’s capacity to absorb greenhouse gases (EAC) to within a specified justifiable range. As part of the search for an adequate account of climate morality, I approach the task by revisiting, and drawing inspiration from, two (...) prominent models from classical political philosophy for thinking about norms (rights, permissions, limits, etc.) regarding “pre-institutional” appropriation of unowned resources; Locke and Kant, respectively. The basic resources they develop—connected to fundamental norms of equality and rights to self-preservation and freedom—in order to generate their particular schema for distributive shares prior to the existence of just institutions can be usefully and plausibly connected up with the scarce, valuable, rival, non-excludable, global, and unowned resource that is EAC in order to undergird a picture of individual climate duties in the contemporary world. It is a picture that comes with some fairly radical implications, especially for the well-off. (shrink)

Do I cause global warming, climate change and their related harms when I go for a leisure drive with my gas-guzzling car? The current verdict seems to be that I do not; the emissions produced by my drive are much too insignificant to make a difference for the occurrence of global warming and its related harms. I argue that our verdict on this issue depends on what we mean by ‘causation’. If we for instance assume a simple counterfactual analysis of (...) causation according to which ‘C causes E’ means ‘if C had not occurred, E would not have occurred’, we must conclude that a single drive does not cause global warming. However, this analysis of causation is well-known for giving counterintuitive results in some important cases. If we instead adopt Lewis’s analysis of causation, it turns out that it is indeterminate whether I cause global warming when I go for a single drive. Still, in contexts where we seek to control or understand global warming, there is a pressure to adopt a more fragile view of this event. When we adopt such a view, it turns out that a single drive does cause global warming. This means that we cannot like Sinnott-Armstrong and Kingston and Sinnott-Armstrong reject the idea that I should refrain from going for a leisure drive simply because such a drive does not cause global warming. (shrink)

Do private individuals have a moral obligation to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions? In his rich and timely paper, Christian Baatz answers this question in the affirmative. People who emit over...

How should we think of the relationship between the climate harms that people will suffer in the future and our current emissions activity? Who does the harming, and what are the moral implications? One way to address these questions appeals to facts about the expected harm associated with one’s own individual energy-consuming activity, and argues that it is morally wrong not to offset one’s own personal carbon emissions. The first half of the article questions the strength of this argument. The (...) second half maintains that a different kind of argument for the same conclusion is stronger. This focuses on the harms that are attributable to carbon emitters considered collectively. (shrink)

Many governments are failing to act sufficiently strongly on climate change. Given this, what should motivated affluent individuals in high-consumption societies do? This paper argues that social norms are a particularly valuable target for individual climate action. Within norm-promotion, the paper makes the case for a focus on anti-fossil fuel norms specifically. Section 1 outlines gaps in the existing literature on individuals’ climate change obligations. Section 2 characterises social norms. Section 3 provides seven reasons why social norms are a particularly (...) worthy target for individual climate actors. Section 4 asks which social norms individuals should emphasise, arguing that anti-fossil fuel norms have advantages over emissions reduction and offsetting norms. Section 5 outlines the pathways and mechanisms individuals might exploit to promote anti-fossil fuel norms. (shrink)

Several philosophers deny that an individual person’s emissions of greenhouse gas do any harm; I call these “individual denialists.” I argue that each individual’s emissions may do harm, and that they certainly do expected harm. I respond to the denialists’ arguments.

Based on three recently published books on climate justice, this article reviews the field of climate ethics in light of developments of international climate politics. The central problem addressed is how idealised normative theories can be relevant to the political process of negotiating a just distribution of the costs and benefits of mitigating climate change. I distinguish three possible responses, that is, three kinds of non-ideal theories of climate justice: focused on (1) the injustice of some agents not doing their (...) part; (2) the policy process and aiming to be realistic; and (3) grievances related to the transition to a clean-energy economy. The methodological discussion underpinning each response is innovative and should be of interest more generally, even though it is still underdeveloped. The practical upshot, however, is unclear: even non-ideal climate justice may be too disconnected from the fast-moving and messy climate circus. (shrink)

What responsibilities does each of us have to reduce or limit our greenhouse gas emissions? Advocates of individual emissions reductions acknowledge that there are limits to what we can reasonably demand from individuals. Climate ethics has not yet systematically explored those limits. Instead, it has become popular to suggest that such judgements should be ‘context-sensitive’ but this does not tell us what role different contextual factors should play in our moral thinking. The current approach to theory development in climate ethics (...) is not likely to be the most effective way to fill this gap. In existing work, climate ethicists use hypothetical cases to consider what can be reasonably demanded of individuals in particular situations. In contrast, ‘climate ethics with an ethnographic sensibility’ uses qualitative social science methods to collect original data in which real individuals describe their own situations. These real-life cases are more realistic, more detailed and cover a broader range of circumstances than hypothetical cases. Normative analysis of real-life cases can help us to develop a more systematic understanding of the role that different contextual factors should play in determining individual climate responsibilities. It can also help us to avoid the twin dangers of ‘idealization’ and ‘special pleading’. (shrink)

In an earlier article I argued that individuals are obligated not to exceed their fair share of emissions entitlements, that many exceed their fair share at present and thus ought to reduce their emissions as far as can reasonably be demanded. The peer commentators raised various insightful and pressing concerns, but the following objections seem particularly important: It was argued that the fair share argument is insufficiently justified, that it is incoherent, that it would result in more far-reaching duties than (...) acknowledged by me, that it is unable to provide a clear account of individual duties, and that duties to reduce individual emissions are not Kantian imperfect duties. This reply aims at clarifying the fair share argument and at addressing the major challenges. (shrink)

In the climate ethics debate, scholars largely agree that individuals should promote institutions that ensure the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. This paper aims to establish that there are individual duties beyond compliance with and promotion of institutions. Duties of individuals to reduce their emissions are often objected to by arguing that an individual’s emissions do not make a morally relevant difference. We challenge this argument from inconsequentialism in two ways. We first show why the argument also seems to undermine (...) the case for duties to promote institutions that the arguments’ proponents endorse. Second, we argue that individuals ought to cut emissions if they exceed their fair share of emissions entitlements and, by emitting, contribute to climate-related harm. In response to inconsequentialism, we specify the notion of ‘contribution’ via the so-called NESS theory, according to which an act is causally relevant for and contributes to an outcome if it is a Necessary Element of a Set of conditions that is Sufficient for the outcome. After refuting two objections to our approach, we conclude by discussing how to deal with possible conflicts between duties to promote institutions and to reduce one’s emissions. (shrink)

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)

In this article I hold that utilitarians are wrong to want to disaggregate climate- induced harm, whether in terms of chaotic or linear causality. This is not because individual emissions do not count, in probabilistic terms, for risk projections of overall climate dam- age, rather because individual emissions only contribute to increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration if the anthropogenic flow of CO2 exceeds the amount of CO2 that can be naturally taken up by the biosphere, over a given time segment. I (...) therefore maintain that individual climate duties consist of reforming the social and technological structures that make each individual emission part of a collective phenomenon, global warming, which leads to an enormous global disutility, climate change. In the final part of the article, I ar- gue that utilitarian ethics would have much more to say if, instead of focusing on the dis- aggregation of climate-induced harm, it addressed the key issues of the energy transition, i.e. carbon pricing, research and development in green technologies and climate finance. (shrink)

We naturally attribute obligations to groups, and take such obligations to have consequences for the obligations of group members. The threat posed by anthropogenic climate change provides an urgent case. It seems that we, together, have an obligation to prevent climate catastrophe, and that we, as individuals, have an obligation to contribute. However, understood strictly, attributions of obligations to groups might seem illegitimate. On the one hand, the groups in question—the people alive today, say—are rarely fully-fledged moral agents, making it (...) unclear how they can be subjects of obligations. On the other, the attributions can rarely be understood distributively, as concerned with members’ obligations, because obligations to do something require a capacity to do it, and individual members often lack the relevant capacities. Moreover, even if groups can have obligations, it is unclear why that would be relevant for members, exactly because members often lack control over whether group obligations are fulfilled. In previous work, I have argued that a general understanding of individual obligations extends non-mysteriously to irreducibly shared obligations, rendering attributions of obligations to groups legitimate. In this paper, I spell out how the proposed account also helps us understand the relation between individual and shared obligations. Even though few individual human agents have any significant control over whether we will be successful in preventing climate catastrophe, our collective capacity to prevent catastrophe and shared preventative obligation to do so can give rise to significant individual obligations to contribute to its fulfillment. (shrink)