Climate Change and Individual Obligations

This chapter concerns the nature of our obligations as individuals when it comes to our emissions-producing activities and climate change. The first half of the chapter argues that the popular ‘expected utility’ approach to this question faces a problematic dilemma: either it gives skeptical verdicts, saying that there are no individual emissions-related obligations, or it yields implausibly strong verdicts. The second half of the chapter diagnoses the problem. It argues that the dilemma arises from a very general feature of the view, and thus is shared by other views as well. It then discusses what an account of our individual obligations needs to look like if it is to avoid the dilemma. Finally, the discussion is extended beyond climate change to other collective impact contexts.

Discounting under Risk

The debate on the economics of climate change has focused primarily on the choice of the social discount rate, which plays a key role in determining the desirability of climate policies given the long-term impacts of climate damages. Discounted utilitarianism and the Ramsey Rule dominate the debate on discounting. The chapter examines the appropriateness of the utilitarian framework for evaluating public policies. More specifically, it focuses on the risky dimension of climate change, and on the failure of utilitarianism in expressing both concerns for the distribution of risks across the population and concerns for the occurrence of catastrophic outcomes. The chapter shows how a shift to the prioritarian paradigm is able to capture those types of concerns, and briefly sketches the main implications for the choice of the social discount rate.

Does Climate Change Policy Depend Importantly on Population Ethics?

Choosing a policy response to climate change seems to demand a population axiology. A formal literature involving impossibility theorems has demonstrated that all possible approaches to population axiology have one or more seemingly counterintuitive implications. This leads to the worry that because axiological theory is radically unresolved, this theoretical ignorance implies serious practical ignorance about what climate policies to pursue. This chapter offers two deflationary responses to this worry. First, it may be that given the actual facts of climate change, all axiologies agree on a particular policy response. In this case, there would be a clear dominance conclusion, and the puzzles of axiology would be practically irrelevant (albeit still theoretically challenging). Second, despite the impossibility results, the authors prove the possibility of axiologies that satisfy bounded versions of all of the desiderata from the population axiology literature, which may be all that is needed for policy evaluation.

Climate Change, Liberalism, and the Public/Private Distinction

Climate change puts pressure on a distinction that is at the heart of liberal theory: that between the public and the private. Many of the GHG-emitting behaviors that contribute to the disruption of the climate system—such as using computers, taking hot showers, eating this or that, driving cars, investing here or there, and having children—are traditionally regarded as private. Yet today, through climate change, these apparently private behaviors can have very public consequences, however indirect, across spatial, temporal, and genetic boundaries. The chapter introduces the public/private distinction and discusses the various ways in which it has figured in liberal theory. It goes on to show how climate change threatens the viability of the distinction, both by intensifying old tensions and by bringing new pressures to bear. It then considers some options for relieving the pressure, none of which seems particularly promising by liberal lights.

How Quickly Should the World Reduce its Greenhouse Gas Emissions?

Given the accompanying sacrifices, how quickly should the present generation reduce its greenhouse gas emissions? The dominant framework for thinking about this question continues to be normative welfare economics. This chapter explains why the dominant approach should be rejected, and outlines the structure of what the author has come to think is the correct one. On this approach, requirements of intergenerational justice are understood, not as the means to, but as the most important constraints on maximizing intertemporal welfare. The chapter explains why the main content of these constraints can be given by the theories of social and international justice. Finally, it explains why the non-identity problem does not undermine the recommended way of thinking about intergenerational justice. Even if the business-as-usual baseline in greenhouse gas emissions will never harm any unborn future people, we can still say that humanity is forever subject to a suitably high environmental conservation standard.

Climate Change and Cultural Cognition

How should we form beliefs concerning global climate change? For most of us, directly evaluating the evidence isn’t feasible; we lack expertise. So, any rational beliefs we form will have to be based in part on deference to those who have it. But in this domain, questions about how to identify experts can be fraught. This chapter discusses a partial answer to the question of how we in fact identify experts: Dan Kahan’s cultural cognition thesis, according to which we treat experts on factual questions of political import only insofar as they share our moral and cultural values. The chapter then poses some normative questions about cultural cognition: is it a species of irrationality that must be overcome if we are to communicate scientific results effectively, or is it instead an inescapable part of rational belief management? Ultimately, it is argued that cultural cognition is substantively unreasonable, though not formally irrational.

Political Realism, Feasibility Wedges, and Opportunities for Collective Action on Climate Change

This chapter raises objections to the argument that a highly unjust response to the problem of climate change is the best that we can currently hope for and is thus the solution that we should actively promote even from an ethical point of view. Such an argument has been put forward by a wide range of commentators in philosophy, economics, law, and international affairs including John Broome, Eric Posner, David Weisbach, and Cass Sunstein. Among other things, the author argues that the way in which this argument fails is both ethically and practically instructive, as its failure reveals how a realist approach to climate policy is consistent with a more equity-focused approach than is commonly appreciated. As a concrete illustration, it is explained how the lessons could be incorporated into a more ethical climate treaty architecture that shares structural features with proposals from William Nordhaus, Joseph Stiglitz, and others.

A Convenient Truth?

Justice would appear to require that those who are the principal beneficiaries of a history of economic and political behavior that has produced dramatic climate change bear a correspondingly large share of the costs of getting it under control. Yet a widespread material ideology of happiness suggests that this would require sacrificing “quality of life” in the most-developed countries—hardly a popular program. However, an empirically-grounded understanding of the nature and function of “subjective well-being”, and of the factors that most influence it, challenges this ideology and suggests instead that well-being in more-developed as well as less-developed societies could be improved consistently with sustainable resource-utilization. If right, this could refocus debates over climate change from the sacrifice of “quality of life” to the enhancement and more equitable distribution of well-being within a framework of sustainable relations with one another and with the rest of nature.

Pareto Improvements and Feasible Climate Solutions

Proponents of International Paretianism (IP)—the principle that international agreements should not make any state worse off and should make some at least better off—argue that it is the only feasible approach to reducing the harms of climate change. They draw on some key assumptions regarding the meaning of ‘feasibility’ and the nature of the Pareto improvements associated with coordinated action on climate change. This chapter challenges these assumptions, in effect weakening the case for IP and allowing for broader thinking about what counts as a ‘feasible’ climate solution.

The Puzzle of Inefficacy

We appear to have reasons to act in light of the relationship between our choices and the horrors of factory farming or the escalating bad effects of climate change, even if we are unable to mitigate those bad effects through our individual choices. This idea can seem puzzling in two ways. First, it can seem puzzling how to explain these reasons, given our inefficacy. Second, it can seem that these reasons, even if they existed, would have to be vanishingly weak. This chapter develops a solution to this puzzle that appeals to a novel explanation of why a feature counts as a focal point in the explanation of ethical properties. This solution is applied to show how our relationship to certain social patterns can explain our reasons to respond to facts about factory farming and climate change, mentioned above.