Climate change confronts humanity with a challenge it has never faced before. It combines issues of global justice and intergenerational justice on an unprecedented scale. In particular, it stands to adversely affect the global poor. So far, the global community has failed to reduce emissions to levels that are necessary to avoid unacceptable risks for the future. Nor are the burdens of emission reductions and of coping with climate impacts fairly shared. The shortcomings of both political and individual climate action (...) thus seem like a paradigmatic case for non-ideal theory. Non-ideal theory can be understood as a form of political theorising that compares different responses to (i) failures of agents to comply with the demands of justice and (ii) unfavourable circumstances. Insofar as non-ideal theory also aims to be action-guiding, it asks normative theorists for a more thorough engagement with the empirical context so as to arrive at practical recommendations for the ‘here and now’. This volume examines the normative issues that become relevant when the non-ideal circumstances of the climate context are fully taken into account. It is comprised of three parts: The first collects chapters that reflect on general issues in responding to the shortcomings of current climate action. Chapters in the second part propose more specific practical reforms. The third part examines how moral values ought to be brought into the scientific, political, and public debates under the non-ideal circumstances of this world. (shrink)

Many have argued that that it is morally wrong to benefit from an agent's culpable wronging of a third party. This thought has formed the basis of some arguments that agents can have duties to make up for wrongful acts by others that they could not have stopped, or that occurred before they were born. For example, it has been argued that those who benefited from slavery, colonialism and other shameful events in their nation's history should surrender those benefits, their (...) equivalent value, or provide other forms of redress. Some have also argued that it is morally wrong to benefit from unjust situations caused by third parties even where there is no culpable element. These ideas have potential to be a principle of redress for harms that are caused by the working of very complex systems, such as the global climate system. Geoengineering, the intentional manipulation of the global climate, is a new development in climate science and policy — and one which raises many normative challenges. This article focuses on one specific challenge. The global climate is very complex and there is a real possibility that the best available science will not be able to account for all the consequences of deploying a geoengineering technique. Therefore, any governance regime that allows deployment will have to consider how to organise compensation or redress for any adverse impacts that could not have been predicted at the time of deployment. This article proposes that, with some modification, the principle that agents should surrender benefits that have accrued to them from using geoengineering techniques, can be a good basis for such a scheme. (shrink)

Land-based climate mitigation schemes such as REDD+ imply the creation of ‘rights to carbon’ for actions that enhance carbon sinks. In many cases, the legal and normative foundations of such rights are unclear. This article focuses on special rights on the basis of improvement. Considering improvement in relation to carbon sinks requires asking what it means to ‘improve’ an environmental resource. Our answer departs in two significant respects from the standard conception of improvement, namely by reconceiving action in relation to (...) ecosystem services, and accordingly, making the case for a counterfactual baseline to be used to compare an improved and unimproved state. Our modifications potentially allow for a variety of agents to claim special carbon rights on the basis of beneficial interactions with land-based carbon sinks. We give three archetypical examples of agents who may claim pro tanto special rights to carbon based on their interaction with carbon sinks. (shrink)

Chris Armstrong argues that attempts at justifying special claims over natural resources generally take one of two forms: arguments from improvement and arguments from attachment. We argue that Armstrong fails to establish that the distinction between natural resources and improved resources has no normative significance. He succeeds only in showing that ‘improvers’ are not necessarily entitled to the full exchange value of the improvement. It can still be argued that the value of natural and improved resources should be distributed on (...) different grounds, but that the value of improvements should be conceived differently. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibility’ admits many interpretations. In the philosophical literature on climate justice, it has typically been cashed out in terms of the following three principles: the ability to pay principle (APP), the beneficiary pays principle (BPP), and the contribution to problem principle (CPP). Many of these accounts have given prominence to the CPP and APP, but there are some who argue that the BPP deserves greater consideration. In this (...) paper, I want to ask whether the BPP must feature in any plausible account of remedial responsibility for climate change. I examine this question by looking at three different ways in which the BPP has been incorporated into accounts of climate burden-sharing. In each case, there are questions about the particular role that the BPP is assigned and it looks like either the BPP must be given equal prominence to the CPP, or the BPP might be redundant when it comes to specific task of remedying the injustices of climate change. I suggest in the conclusion one possible reason to maintain the BPP. (shrink)