Responsibility for climate justice: Political not moral

Abstract

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.

Responsibility for Future Climate Justice: The Direct Responsibility to Mitigate Structural Injustice for Future Generations

“…Sardo writes: 'An individual person's or state's carbon footprint is bound up in global supply chains, fragmenting mitigation responsibility over a large number of differentially positioned agents'. 49 This also shows why climate justice cannot be separated from 'global and intergenerational structures of colonialism, economic development and financial capitalism', 50 an important point to which we return in our example below in Section 4.2. Thinking from structures, the nation state borders are not magical boundaries beyond which our responsibility for justice evaporates, and the elitist setting up his private school system on his privately owned island retains responsibility in as far as his capital flows through and makes use of the global structures within which unjust positions arise.…”

“…Unruh's premise P1 entails that bringing into existence is done within institutions and traditions, and her argument for moral responsibility should therefore be extended to cover the social and structural problems this raises as well. This inevitably forces us to take 'political considerations' 27 about structural injustice into account, which, however, should not lead us to take away all responsibility from individuals.…”

Collective responsibility for climate change

“…Recently, the theorizing about climate change responsibility has focused increasingly on the systemic nature of the problem (e.g., Eckersley, 2016;Sardo, 2020;Schwenkenbecher, 2021;Whyte, 2017). This literature combines elements from the two viewpoints on collective responsibility discussed in this article, as it highlights how climate change injustices are produced by the actions of groups of individuals related to each other through societal and institutional connections, and how corrective action is therefore required at the institutional, structural level.…”

The ethics of climate activism

“…Another important set of norms is the international legal system that gives little to no influence to people in climate‐vulnerable countries over political decisions in other countries that decide their climate future. The social connection model thus grounds a duty to engage in climate activism and resist these norms (Godoy, 2017a, 2017c; Sardo, 2020).…”