To avoid the disastrous effects of climate change, a rapid and drastic transition toward a low-carbon society and economy is required. This transition imposes significant transitional losses on some agents given the benefits they can no longer realize. In economic terms, it leads to the stranding of their assets. This article investigates whether fossil fuel owners could refer to their expectations about the benefits of producing their reserves to justify transitional measures such as exemptions from new rules or financial compensations. (...) It criticizes forward-looking views on the normative relevance of expectations and defends a backward-looking view, which justifies limited claims. It contends that states that are responsible for creating false expectations about regulatory stability should provide compensations to fossil fuel companies for the costs of relying on those expectations. States can be held responsible if they caused this expectation-related harm in a foreseeable and avoidable way, which is only the case if the expectation is reasonable and if they were not put under pressure by the lobbying activities of the fossil fuel industry. (shrink)

Statelessness and displacement represent nothing short of a loss of place, the violation of rights and international norms, threat to safety and belonging, and severely limits access to law and citizenship. Social work must leverage and sustain an ethical standpoint as a critical counterpoint to the increasing moral and political urgency of statelessness. However, traditional and normative social work ethics operate at a level of abstraction that do not engage sufficiently with the realpolitik of statelessness. This paper critically engages with (...) moral questions concerning displacement and statelessness by engaging the philosophy of James Tully and Christine Korsgaard. This engagement enables connections between agency and notions of democratic constitutionalism where people have the right to call into and contest relations of governance that oppress them, through various means such as advocacy and activism. We present a reconsideration of established ethical understandings by arguing for the place of public philosophy and the constitution of the self as key to social work theory and practice in response to statelessness and displacement. Korsgaard’s work on normativity and agency, and Tully’s notion of democratic constitutionalism provide a rich and original contribution to social work ethics that will be articulated for social work theory and practice. (shrink)