Anthropogenic climate change threatens humanity as a whole, making its mitigation a matter of pressing concern. Mitigation efforts at the institutional level are necessary to successfully change the course of climate change, but thus far governments and industries have been ineffective at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. A point of philosophical contention is whether individuals have a moral responsibility to reduce their own emissions given the lack of institutional action. I argue that they do by redefining climate change as a collective (...) impact. Individual emitters share collective responsibility for that impact, which translates to an individual duty to reduce their contribution. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

My aim in this paper is to explore the idea of human moral responsibility for of natural disasters. First, I discuss the claim that there is often a human causal contribution to negative outcomes of even such paradigmatic natural disasters as earthquakes, typhoons, and volcano eruptions. Second, I attempt to move away from discussions attributing human causal responsibility to discussions attributing human moral responsibility for such outcomes. I suggest that in most cases of moral responsibility for the outcomes of natural (...) disasters moral responsibility is grounded in culpable negligence, including culpable failure to prevent the side-effects of our actions or omissions. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose meaningfulness as one important evaluative criterion in individual climate ethics and suggest that most of our greenhouse gas emitting actions, behaviours, and lives are the opposite of meaningful: anti-meaningful. We explain why such actions etc. score negatively on three important dimensions of the meaningfulness scale, which we call the agential, narrative, and generative dimensions. We suggest that thinking about individual climate ethics also in terms of (anti-) meaningfulness illuminates important aspects of our troubled ethical involvement (...) with CC and can make a fresh and fruitful contribution to existing discussions, which tend to focus on moral responsibility and obligations. (shrink)

The political representation of future generations would change the relationship between public decisions and the members of democratic political systems. In this paper we examine the implication of these changes on the responsibility of the living members for the future effects of current polices with special reference to climate change. The claim defended is that the collective responsibility of the living members for future outcomes diminishes when public decisions are made less responsive to them. In order to explain why this (...) is the case a ‘participatory account' of collective responsibility is developed according to which collective responsibility is premised on the extent to which public decisions depend on their members. The paper concludes with a discussion on the grounds for valuing collective outcome responsibility and why the conflict between this norm and the claim that future generations should be granted political representation poses fundamental questions about the value of democracy. (shrink)

In this article I hold that utilitarians are wrong to want to disaggregate climate- induced harm, whether in terms of chaotic or linear causality. This is not because individual emissions do not count, in probabilistic terms, for risk projections of overall climate dam- age, rather because individual emissions only contribute to increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration if the anthropogenic flow of CO2 exceeds the amount of CO2 that can be naturally taken up by the biosphere, over a given time segment. I (...) therefore maintain that individual climate duties consist of reforming the social and technological structures that make each individual emission part of a collective phenomenon, global warming, which leads to an enormous global disutility, climate change. In the final part of the article, I ar- gue that utilitarian ethics would have much more to say if, instead of focusing on the dis- aggregation of climate-induced harm, it addressed the key issues of the energy transition, i.e. carbon pricing, research and development in green technologies and climate finance. (shrink)