Abstract

The international discussion on the greenhouse problem is constantly confronted with arguments about historical responsibility. Consider for instance the 1991 Beijing declaration on Environment and Development which states that “[...] the developed countries bear responsibility for the degradation of the global environment. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, the developed countries have over-exploited the world's natural resources through unsustainable patterns of production and consumption, causing damage to the global environment, to the detriment of the developing countries.”The notion of historical responsibility became even more central to the discussion when, in the context of the Kyoto negotiations in 1997, Brazil launched a proposal in which it used cumulative emissions from 1840 until today as the point of reference for defining the abatement targets for the countries taking part in the negotiations. The obvious effect was that the entire economic burden connected to the greenhouse problem was shifted to the industrialized countries. Although the Brazilian proposal has been heavily criticized, mainly on methodological grounds, the historical responsibility claim has certainly not disappeared; on the contrary, it has risen to the forefront and remains the main argument used by non-industrialized countries to claim that the greenhouse problem is essentially a problem of the rich countries.The contributions one can read in this issue are the result of a workshop on Historical Responsibility and the Greenhouse Problem, held last year at the University of Leuven. All of them are rooted in an ongoing, mostly Anglo-American, discussion about our relation towards past and future generations that knows two defining moments: the publication of Rawls’ A Theory of Justice in which the issue of what should be done for future generations was explicitly tackled and Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons that incited a flurry of articles on intergenerational responsibility.The first contribution, “An ‘Ideal’ Normative Theory for Greenhouse Negotations?” , is divided into two parts, a scientific one in which the present state of our understanding of the greenhouse problem is presented, and a second part which develops, in a Rawlsian spirit, an ideal normative theory of how we should handle the greenhouse problem. Let me quickly review the basic scientific facts with respect to the greenhouse problem :- We know that the Earth’s climate has changed considerably since the pre-industrial era; that this is at least partly due to human intervention; and that the effect will speed up if we continue to develop according to current economic and demographic trends.- The environmental impact of the rise in average temperature will be: an rise in sea level ; a drastic change in agricultural conditions; a shift in vegetation and wildlife conditions which could exterminate several species; and an increase of extreme climate conditions .- The economic costs connected to these environmental changes are unevenly distributed with the bulk of the burden concentrated in developing countries.The second part of this paper develops a normative framework. Their moral point of departure is that a normative framework should start from a preferential option for the poor on the basis of which they argue that the greenhouse problem is essentially a problem of distributive justice, not one of historical injustice or corrective justice. Underlying this is the strong belief that the present distribution of resources is grossly unjust, and that this injustice validates the conclusion that even if the rich did not cause the problem, they still have to solve it. According to the authors, the distributive justice argument not only overrides historical injustice, but even makes redundant the entire question of historical responsibility. Given their fundamental ethical idea of priority to the fate of the poor , it is absurd to impose on poor people in the ‘rich North’ part of the burden for misery in other parts of the world.The second article, “Compensating Wrongless Historical Emissions” , at first sight openly disagrees with this and opens the door for compensation demands based on an argument from historical responsibility. This text is firmly rooted in Parfit’s approach to the problem of future generations and concentrates mainly on the question what it means to harm future living people.Meyer refutes Parfit’s contingency argument which entails that the contingency of future people upon the actions that influence their interests makes it impossible for these future people to claim compensation for past harms which only can be the case if we believe that attributing interests to future people requires us to make reference to individual persons. As an alternative, he formulates a certain decency threshold, a baseline, below which we feel no human person, whoever she might be, should ever sink, as an alternative. This threshold gives rise to what he calls the subjunctive threshold view of harm. According to this view an action at time t1 harms someone only if the agent thereby causes a person to fall below some specified threshold. A weakness in Meyer’s solution to the problem is the exact specification of this threshold. It is clear that a specific threshold reflects existing social, economic and cultural conditions. As we are very unsure of the living conditions of generations far removed, it also becomes rather difficult to state with any precision what duties present people could be said to have towards future people.In his contribution “Historical Emissions and Free-Riding” Axel Gosseries tackles the problem of historical injustice from a completely different angle. His problem is that of transgenerational free-riding. Consider two communities, the US and Bangladesh, and two generations. With greenhouse pollution, as with ozone depletion due to CFK exhaustion, the long lifetime of the chemical particles involved allows for a direct causal relationship between the acts of the past generation and the harm suffered by the current generation. The question Gosseries asks is: should current US citizens not pay some compensation to current Bangladeshi people, even though current US citizens are not themselves morally responsible for the actions of their ancestors? The argument in favor of compensation rests on the fact that the current US generation benefited from the past emissions, and is thus a transgenerational free-rider on the actions of their ancestors.Through his discussion of different arguments pro and con Gosseries builds his argument that there is room for moral accountability without admitting moral responsibility. The intermediary step is the fact that the current generation benefits from the harmful acts of the previous generation, and now knows that these acts were harmful for the poor community but beneficial for themselves. Stated differently, the problem is that the current US generation keeps the benefits that come with the emission of greenhouse gases, while the current Bangladeshi people forgo these benefits, but carry a large part of the burden that was directly caused by the harmful actions of the previous US generation.If this is the case, and the current US community is well aware of this, then this community is a free-rider: they benefit from a positive externality made possible through costs to others without paying anything in return.In his long commentary on the article by Gosseries, Geert Demuijnck disagrees. He points out that the argument which Gosseries develops is embedded in a libertarian framework, and that in such a framework a claim for compensation can only be justified if one starts from a situation that was basically just. It is only when you start from a legitimate distribution of property rights that the libertarian can claim that harm was done to property rights and that a form of compensation should be granted. If, however, you do not know whether property rights were justly distributed at the start, the entire exercise collapses and there are no claims for compensation to be made. Gosseries misses this point. Demuijnck’s own position comes very close to that of Eyckmans and Schokkaert. He too rejects the relevance of historical injustices, and believes we should better concentrate on the distribution of current emissions and current GDP per capita. Again, it is distributive justice which is considered to be of primary interest: the rich should pay because they are rich, not because they polluted.Finally, in the last article “Discounting the Future” I discuss the notion of a discount rate. Suffice it to say that the standard use of a discount rate makes all distant valuations dwindle. Far-off costs and benefits no longer enter the picture. This might be crucial when you discuss problems with a long-term horizon like the greenhouse problem or the costs of nuclear energy or the merits of conserving cultural heritage. If far-off costs and benefits do not count, then future generations might be left with lots of nuclear waste, few resources and a severely degraded natural environment. Not surprisingly an entire literature has developed concentrating on the link between the discount rate and the fate of future generations. But the discount rate could also influence our judgment of the past. Think about restitution for past wrongdoings: aboriginals in Australia, the Maori in New Zealand, the Inuit in Canada, Japanese-Americans interned during the Second World War — all claim monetary restitution. When confronted with problems stretching over time, the choice of a discount rate greatly influences the final results.This thematic issue of Ethical Perspectives on historical responsibility and the greenhouse problem certainly does not come up with a definite consensus on the matter. There are two articles which claim that the historical responsibility argument is irrelevant in normative discussions about the greenhouse problem, or is at least strongly dominated by distributive justice arguments that look at present emissions and at the present distribution of wealth. Yet two other texts claim that it is possible to demand compensation for past harm and that these demands can make a difference. But despite this disagreement, there are also some significant agreements. Everybody rejects the notion of moral responsibility for past emissions; all agree that the level of moral analysis is, in the end, that of the individual and not of states or any other aggregate; all agree that Parfit’s non-identity problem does not threaten our responsibility towards the past or towards the future; all believe that a distributive policy based on historical responsibility arguments or one based on distributive justice arguments grounded in the present situation will not imply a seriously different policy. Burdens and benefits will have to be distributed in more or less the same way in order to be equitable. These are, I believe, valuable insights that give us a somewhat better grasp of the normative nature of the greenhouse problem