Abstract
In this paper I make the following claims. In order to see anthropogenic climate change as clearly involving moral wrongs and global injustices, we will have to revise some central concepts in these domains. Moreover, climate change threatens another value (“respect for nature”) that cannot easily be taken up by concerns of global justice or moral responsibility.
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Notes
For a study that focuses on this second sort of risk, see the National Academy of Science report (2002).
However, recent work by Joshua Knobe suggests that attributions of causal responsibility often follow attributions of practical responsibility rather than the other way around. See Knobe (2006).
Jules Coleman may be denying this when he claims that a case in which “you’ve done nothing about shoveling the snow from your walkways” and someone “coming to visit you slips and breaks her leg […] is a case of responsibility without causation” (Coleman 1992, p. 274). For present purposes I will leave aside the question of whether he is denying my claim, and if so, whether his claim would be plausible.
For more on this see Jamieson (2005).
See Shue (1993).
I first introduced this series of examples in Jamieson (2007b).
I am assuming that the perception of urgency flags as a problem drifts further from the paradigm. Whether or not this is true is worthy of further investigation.
According to a recent Rasmussen Report, 44% of American voters say that climate change is primarily caused by long-term planetary trends rather than human activity. See Rasmussen Report (2009). It could be argued that these Americans are culpable in their ignorance of the relation between human action and climate change, but when prominent public figures are climate change deniers and science education is so obviously inadequate it is difficult to make this case.
The most thorough treatment of the normative significance of harm causation is Joel Feinberg’s magisterial four-volume work (Feinberg 1984–1988). Though criminal law is Feinberg’s main concern, much of what he says applies to morality as well.
For an introduction to this work visit http://faculty.virginia.edu/haidtlab/mft/index.php?t=home.
See The Economist (2007).
Here I rely on data from Steve Pacala (personal communication).
See, for example, Singer (2001).
I am greatly indebted to Paul Taylor’s early and important work on this topic; however, it will become clear that my conception of respect for nature is significantly different from his. See Taylor (1989).
There are other accounts of domination in the literature that are typically applied to humans dominating other humans, but, as far as I can see, they are not committed to the idea that only humans can be the subjects of domination. See, for example, Pettit (1997). Generally on the subject of domination I have benefited from John Nolt’s unpublished ‘Greenhouse Gas Emissions and the Domination of Posterity’.
Jerome Schneewind argues that autonomy is a relatively recent conceptual construction with its origins in Kant. See Schneewind (1997).
Those who find Leiss’s view convincing can view me as defending an analogue duty to respect for nature that is violated when the analogue to the human domination of nature that is now occurring obtains.
I owe this image to Jeremy Waldron (personal communication).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank audiences at conferences in Florence, Paris and Amsterdam for helpful discussions of this material, and two anonymous referees for their excellent comments which I have not been able to fully take on board. Thanks in particular to Furio Cerutti and Govert den Hartogh for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.
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Jamieson, D. Climate Change, Responsibility, and Justice. Sci Eng Ethics 16, 431–445 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-009-9174-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-009-9174-x