In what follows, I show, first, how the greater part of debate about the ethics of climate change focuses on questions about who has what responsibility to bear the burdens of mitigating it or adapting to it. These questions are frequently in practice inflected in the language of rights, and the various connections between human rights and climate change are examined next. If some questions concern justice in the present, others regard our responsibilities to the future, as examined in the third section. The fourth main area of inquiry concerns the relation between individual and collective responsibilities.
This book shows why a fundamental right to an adequate environment ought to be provided in the constitution of any modern democratic state. Explains why the right to an environment adequate for one’s health and well-being is a genuine human right and why it ought to be constitutionalised. Elaborates this case and defends it in closely argued responses to critical challenges. Shows why there is no insurmountable obstacle to the effective implementation of this constitutional right, and why constitutionalising this right is not democratically illegitimate. With particular reference to European Union member states, it explains what this right adds to the states’ existing human rights and environmental commitments Concludes by showing how constitutional environmental rights can serve to promote the cause of environmental justice in a global context.
What should a political theorist say about the justice of the global distribution of natural resources? One issue is whether principles of distributive justice should be applied globally, and this has been debated between nationalists and cosmopolitans. A second, though, is how the category of ‘natural resources’ should be conceived in relation to other distributable goods. This has not adequately been addressed even by theorists of global justice who expressly focus on natural resources. In particular, neither Charles Beitz’s argument for a natural resources redistribution principle nor David Miller’s argument against works with a satisfactory account of how the physical distribution of resources relates to the distribution of their economic value. A more satisfactory account can be developed from the perspective of ecological economics as inspired by Nicholas Georgescu‐Roegen. From this perspective, global inequalities in the command of natural resources can be viewed with the clarity that a normative theory of their justice requires. If natural resources are re‐conceptualised in terms of ‘ecological space’, Beitz’s argument can be recast and vindicated. The re‐conceptualisation is necessary to overcome the problems with the original version, as is shown by reference to the existing alternative formulations of Hillel Steiner and Thomas Pogge.
Anthropocentrism can intelligibly be criticised as an ontological error, but attempts to conceive of it as an ethical error are liable to conceptual and practical confusion. After noting the paradox that the clearest instances of overcoming anthropocentrism involve precisely the sort of objectivating knowledge which many ecological critics see as itself archetypically anthropocentric, the article presents the following arguments: there are some ways in which anthropocentrism is not objectionable; the defects associated with anthropocentrism in ethics are better understood as instances of speciesism and human chauvinism; it is unhelpful to call these defects anthropocentrism because there is an ineliminable element of anthropocentrism in any ethic at all; moreover, because the defects do not typically involve a concern with human interests as such, the rhetoric of anti-anthropocentrism is counterproductive in practice.
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