Abstract
The fact of a carbon budget given commitment to limiting global-mean temperature increase to below 2 °C warming relative to pre-industrial levels makes CO2 emissions a scarce resource. This fact has significant consequences for the ethics of climate change. The paper highlights some of these consequences with respect to (a) applying principles of distributive justice to the allocation of rights to emissions and the costs of mitigation and adaptation, (b) compensation for the harms and risks of climate change, (c) radical new ideas about a place for criminal justice in tackling climate change, and (d) catastrophe ethics.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
In modern times, the most famous theory of this type is John Rawls’ ‘justice as fairness’ (Rawls 1971). Thinking about distributive justice from a philosophical perspective has a long history, and much contemporary political philosophy (at least in the Anglo-American tradition) is concerned with questions of distributive justice.
An important book in this field is Coleman 1992.
The philosophy of criminal justice is enjoying a renaissance at present. One could do no better than to start with Duff 2009.
The term ‘Anthropocene’ refers to a new epoch in the Earth’s history in which human activity is, for the first time, having a significant global impact. See Crutzen and Stoermer 2000.
Rawls uses his famous ‘veil of ignorance’ to justify this principle as the one any person would choose if they did not know the particular generation to which they belong. For Rawls, this models the irrelevance of temporal location to any person’s status as a being deserving of justice. Note that the claim does not imply that all generations are required to save at a uniform rate for the sake of later generations. (Rawls 1993).
An extended discussion of the equal per capita view, and other issues related to distributive justice in the allocation of emissions see Caney 2012.
A promising approach to these questions draws on Sen and Nussbaum’s ‘capabilities’ approach (Sen 1992). On this view, what matters, from a political point of view, for the assessment of advantage is not levels of welfare enjoyed, or amounts of resources owned or controlled, but rather the extent to which people are free to achieve well being, understood in terms of objective opportunities to do, and become, what they have reason to value.
Most people would think it would be very generous of you to act in the ways specified by the demands, but given the unreliability of generosity as a motive - especially when the sacrifices involved relate to all the comforts and pleasures of living in a more developed country - what we really want are arguments to show that you can be legitimately compelled to make the sacrifices required to meet the demands.
He analyses the Kyoto Protocol in exactly these terms.
Gardiner argues that geoengineering presents significant opportunities for morally corrupt intergenerational buck passing. It enables the geoengineering generation to tell themselves that they are making a ‘morally serious choice’ by doing this instead of reducing emissions, when the reality is that the geoengineering generation will probably not have to bear any of the risks of implementing the technology, and will have increased the emissions reductions burden for subsequent generations (Gardiner 2011, 364).
These worries also apply to offsetting schemes (Hyams and Fawcett 2013).
McKinnon, ‘Climate Change as Postericide’, Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship 2014–16, grant number RF-2014-021/8.
References
Adam D (2011) Climate change in court. Nat Clim Chang 1:127–130
Ackerman F (2008) Can we afford the future? The economics of a warming world. Zed Books, London
Broome J (1994) Discounting the future. Philos Public Aff 23(2):128–156
Broome J (2012) Climate matters. W.W. Norton, New York
Caney S (2012) Just emissions. Philos Public Aff 40(4):255–300
Coleman J (1992) Risks and wrongs. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Cowen T, Parfit D (1992) Against the social discount rate. In: Laslett P, Fishkin JS (eds) Justice between age groups and generations. Yale University Press, New Haven
Crutzen PJ, Stoermer EF (2000) The ‘Anthropocene’. Glob Chang Newslett 41:17–18
Duff RA (2009) Answering for crime: responsibility and liability in the criminal law. Hart, Oxford
Duff RA (2010) Authority and responsibility in international criminal law. In: Besson S, Tasioulas J (eds) The philosophy of international law. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Farber DA (2008) The case for climate compensation: doing justice to climate change victims in a complex world. Utah Law Rev 2:1–36
Gardiner SM (2011) A perfect moral storm: the ethical tragedy of climate change. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Hunter D, Salzman J (2007) Negligence in the air: the duty of care in climate change litigation. Univ Pa Law Rev 155(6):1741–1794
Hyams K, Fawcett T (2013) The ethics of carbon offsetting. Wiley Interdiscip Rev Clim Chang 4(2):91–98
Jamieson D (2005) Adaptation, mitigation, and justice. In: Sinnott-Armstrong W, Howarth RB (eds) Perspectives on climate change: science, economics, politics, ethics. Elsevier, Amsterdam
Jamieson D (2014) Reason in a dark time: Why the struggle against climate change failed, and what it means for our future. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Luban D (2004) A theory of crimes against humanity. Yale J Int Law 29:85–167
McKinnon C (2011) Climate change and future justice: precaution, compensation and triage. Routledge, London
Rawls J (1971) A theory of justice. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Rawls J (1993) Political liberalism. Columbia University Press, New York
Rogelj J, McCollum DL, O’Neill BC, Riahi K (2013) 2020 emissions levels required to limit warming to below 2°C. Nat Clim Chang 3:405–412
Sen A (1992) Inequality reexamined. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Shue H (1980) Basic rights: subsistence, affluence and U.S. Foreign policy. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Shue H (1993) Subsistence emissions and luxury emissions. Law Policy 15(1):39–59
Shue H (1995) Avoidable necessity: global warming, international fairness, and alternative energy. In: Shapiro I, Wagner DeCew J (eds) Theory and practice: NOMOS XXXVII. NYU Press, New York, pp 239–264
Shue H (2013) Climate hope: implementing the exit strategy. Chic J Int Law 13(2):381–402
Singer P (2002) One world: the ethics of globalisation. Yale University Press, New Haven
Vanderheiden S (2008) Atmospheric justice: a political theory of climate change. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Acknowledgments
I am very grateful to Reto Knutti and Joeri Rogelj for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Comments made by Dominic Roser and two anonymous referees for the journal also greatly helped to improve the paper.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This article is part of a Special Issue on “Climate Justice in Interdisciplinary Research” edited by Christian Huggel, Markus Ohndorf, Dominic Roser, Ivo Wallimann-Helmer
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
McKinnon, C. Climate justice in a carbon budget. Climatic Change 133, 375–384 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-015-1382-6
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-015-1382-6