The Relevance of Distributive Justice to International Climate Change Policy

A central question about the ethics of climate change is whether individuals or nations who have emitted greenhouse gases in the past should be held responsible for their pollution. If individuals or nations 1 were held responsible for their past pollution, they would be required to repair the harm that their pollution caused. As a practical matter, developed nations were the first to use fossil fuels. Developed nations accordingly emitted more greenhouse gases in the past than other nations. Thus, theories that hold nations responsible for their past emissions would require developed nations to take on relatively greater commitments to reduce emissions than developing countries.The argument for holding nations responsible for past emissions has received substantial attention in the literature. For example, Peter Singer (2004, 33-34) stated the idea as follows:[T]o put it in terms a child could understand, as far as the atmosphere is concerned, the developed countries broke it. If we believe that people should contribute to fixing something in proportion to their responsibility for breaking it, then the developed nations owe it to the rest of the world to fix the problem with the atmosphere.1. Although many aspects of claims of responsibility for past emissions will be different depending on whether individuals or nations are held responsible (see Posner and Weisbach 2010, 103-06), our claims apply equally to individuals as to nations. Therefore, for ease of reference, we will simply speak of "nations" for the remainder of this article.

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“…30. Compare the analysis in Posner and Weisbach (2010) to that in Baer (2012), Caney (2014), Nelson (2011), andSachs (2014). 31.…”

Section: Is the Lrp Supported By An Attractive Theory Of Justice?mentioning

confidence: 96%

Two Theories of Responsibility for Past Emissions of Carbon Dioxide

Drake

Weisbach

2016

SSRN Journal

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“…Finally, we can consider the realists' arguments themselves, which have received significant attention in the philosophical literature, with objections to their welfarist assumptions (Bernstein, 2015), to their narrow construal of distributive justice (Bernstein, 2016; Sachs, 2014), disagreement about whether International Paretianism is incompatible with calls for fairness (Boran, 2017), and multiple concerns about precisifying what feasibility amounts to (Caney, 2014; Gardiner, 2017; Gardiner, 2021; Steele, 2021). Gardiner and Weisbach (2016) debate the issues at length, with Weisbach denying that he needs to defend a particular account of feasibility and asserting that his procedural rejection of justice in climate policy and Gardiner's substantive concerns about extant climate theories means that the two positions ultimately converge (Weisbach, 2021).…”

Section: Moral Choices In Nonideal Carbon Tax Policymentioning

confidence: 99%

Carbon tax ethics

Mintz‐Woo

2023

WIREs Climate Change

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Ideal carbon tax policy is internationally coordinated, fully internalizes externalities, redistributes revenues to those harmed, and is politically acceptable, generating predictable market signals. Since nonideal circumstances rarely allow all these conditions to be met, moral issues arise. This paper surveys some of the work in moral philosophy responding to several of these issues. First, it discusses the moral drivers for estimates of the social cost of carbon. Second, it explains how national self‐interest can block climate action and suggests international policies—carbon border tax adjustments and carbon clubs—that can help address these concerns. Third, it introduces some of the social science literature about the political acceptability of carbon taxes before addressing a couple common public concerns about carbon taxes. Finally, it introduces four carbon revenue usage options, arguing that redistributive and climate compensation measures are most morally justified.This article is categorized under: Climate, Nature, and Ethics > Ethics and Climate Change Climate, Nature, and Ethics > Climate Change and Global Justice Climate and Development > Social Justice and the Politics of Development

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“…HECC governance arrangements risk determining an unfair distribution of the benefits and burdens of the intended transformations to cope with HECC that could exceedingly penalize more vulnerable subjects [54], as well as future generations [11]. Modifications in governance arrangements for dealing with HECC should therefore take account of, and orient their action according to the requirements of distributive justice, the relevant moral standard for achieving the fairness cardinal direction [55]. Distributive justice envisages a fair allocation of "benefits and burdens in society" [56] (p. 18), these being broadly conceived to also include non-monetary elements.…”

Section: Pillar Iii: Fairness Distributive Justice and Sufficiencymentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a Moral Compass to Guide Sustainability Transformations in a High-End Climate Change World

Grasso

Tàbara

2019

Sustainability

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High-end climate change (HECC) raises unprecedented challenges for the transformation of society’s governance arrangements. In such potentially dangerous situation, these challenges have profound moral—rather than only scientific, technical, or managerial—implications. Unfortunately, despite the growing recognition of the necessity for morally-grounded, urgent social-ecological reconfigurations in order to sustainably navigate the uncertain landscape derived from HECC, explicit moral guidance to support the transformation of governance arrangements is still lacking. This work, through the metaphor of a moral compass, proposes a normative tool to support an integrated assessment processes in order to confront the moral challenges and dilemmas in governance and thus favour sustainable transformations under conditions of HECC.

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The Relevance of Distributive Justice to International Climate Change Policy

Cited by 11 publications

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Two Theories of Responsibility for Past Emissions of Carbon Dioxide

Two Theories of Responsibility for Past Emissions of Carbon Dioxide

Carbon tax ethics

Towards a Moral Compass to Guide Sustainability Transformations in a High-End Climate Change World

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