Global Climate Justice and Individual Duties

GLOBAL CLIMATE JUSTICE AND INDIVIDUAL DUTIES

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy

Colin J. Hickey, M.A.

Washington, D.C. September 11, 2017

GLOBAL CLIMATE JUSTICE AND INDIVIDUAL DUTIES

Colin J. Hickey, M.A.

Dissertation Co-Advisors: Margaret Olivia Little, Ph.D., Madison Powers, J.D., D.Phil

Abstract

In this dissertation I develop an account of the morality of climate change. As a moral problem that is a function of the aggregation of many seemingly innocuous individual actions, climate change is in significant tension with the traditional model of individual responsibility. In response to this tension, and in light of the struggles of alternative strategies, I suggest that the most promising way forward is to pursue a particular kind of theory of global distributive justice, which frames climate change as a moral problem regarding the overuse of a scarce, valuable, rival, non-excludable global resource that no one owns, the earth’s atmospheric absorptive capacity (AAC). Such an approach is uniquely suited to accomplish a number of important tasks of an adequate theory of climate morality in a unified way; namely, it can recognize the importance of collective institutions, capture the distribution of collective institutional responsibility, and explain pre-institutional responsibilities and their relationship to collective institutional responsibility. After clearing the groundwork for such a theory of global distributive justice I begin to fill it out by arguing that individuals are, pre-institutionally, bound as a matter of global distributive justice to restrict their use, or benefit from the use, of AAC to within a specified justifiable range and that this serves as the normative basis for what distributively just global institutions to govern climate change would look like in allocating access to that resource and its benefits. I further defend an account of the individual duty to participate in the creation of just climate institutions, what I also refer to as the duty to collectivize.

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Acknowledgements

I begin these acknowledgements resigned to the fact that I will come up hopelessly, woefully short in adequately recognizing the vast network of scaffolding it took to produce this dissertation. It is the product of a whole mode of existence that the Georgetown Philosophy Department opened up for me by inviting me into its circle. Chiefly within that intellectual eco-system, of course, is my all-star team of dissertation advisors, Maggie, Madison, and Henry. Their support, guidance, wisdom, and, yes, enduring patience was beyond anything I deserved. Every level of this dissertation, from its broadest contours to its most fine-grained details, is immeasurably improved from having their exacting minds pour over it. They helped me home in on its argumentative identity, and managed to structure and articulate my thoughts when I couldn’t. They strengthened the arguments that could be strengthened and helped me see the light on claims, research, and flailing arguments I was attached to, but which weren’t working. The questions they posed, worries they pressed, and successes they marked each made me a better scholar and a clearer thinker. While I own all of its faults, whatever measure of progress or insight is contained herein belongs just as much to them as it does to me. I was only ever in a position to benefit from my committee’s gracious mentorship with unending support from the rest of the department. I want to thank, in particular, Wayne Davis and Bill Blattner for their leadership and generous support of my early career as a scholar. I also want to thank Karen Stohr who commented on portions of this dissertation at the drop of a hat, was always a boundless source of conversation, and offered so much guidance for my development as a teacher. Many pages of this dissertation were written in Neil Lewis’ office that he graciously let me use for so many years. I’ve received too much support from individual faculty members throughout the years in coursework, meetings, hallway or email conversations, etc. to single them all out, but however large or subtle, these gestures will never go unappreciated. I am deeply appreciative of Carina and the office staff, as well as the folks up in the KIE that housed me for so many years as a Graduate Fellow. I also want to thank the Ethics and Bioethics Bowl teams and my students more generally. Finally, I should mention one of the true mainstays of department life for me; my lovely daily hallway conversations with Clarence.

I owe so much of my development as both a person and professional philosopher to the dear friends I was lucky enough to share the graduate school process with. You were variously my models to emulate, the sympathetic voices with whom I could commiserate, the sounding boards to my fledgling thoughts, the sources of so much of my joy, and through your encouragement and investments in my agency you were the deepest sources of my belief that completing this dissertation might be possible. I am again embarrassed to not be able to do justice to the full weight of each of your contributions to my personal or academic flourishing, but I want to thank a few people in particular, beginning with my various writing partners Jake Earl, Travis Rieder, and Anne Jeffrey. I hope you already know, you mean the world to me. I also want to thank Trip Glazer, Ben Elzinga, and Andy Blitzer for all manner of support, laughs, and hijinks. Thanks also to the rest of my truly wonderful cohort Francisco Gallegos, Kevin Schieman, and Gordon Shannon, as well as Kelly Heuer, Katherine Ward, Marcus Hedahl, Kyle Fruh, Luke Maring, Tony Manela, David Bachyrycz, Laura Guidry-Grimes, Hailey Huget, and so many others. It’s because of you all that I found a home in D.C. Finally, whatever successes of mine are reflected in these pages, are also thanks to those outside my Georgetown community who kept me tethered to things of beauty beyond the bounds of academia and prevented its way of being from enveloping me wholesale. My mom and brothers were anchors so steady that any attempt to put my gratitude into words results in a teary-eyed mess. The rest of my extended Colorado community, and the mountains they are connected to, served as an inexhaustible source of renewal. I have felt a part of so many families throughout the years that all deserve recognition, but special thanks to Josh, Jenna and Mike, Brian and their families, as well as Bill, Yvonne, Lauren, and Ad for the many oases throughout the years. Thanks to Jim Heft for timely check-ins. Finally, my dance community in D.C. gave me balance, the depths of which I will only continue to appreciate in the fullness of time. With truly more gratitude than I can muster, my sincerest thank you!

Contents

1 Climate Change and Individual Morality: A Central Tension...... 1 Introduction ...... 1 Section One: A Commonsense Conception of Individual Responsibility ...... 3 Section Two: The Dangers and Structure of Climate Change ...... 8 Section Three: Clarifying the Tension ...... 12 Section Four: A Meta-Ethical Clarification ...... 20 Concluding Remarks ...... 24 2 Strategies to Resolve the Fundamental Tension and Account for the Morality of Climate Change ...... 26 Introduction ...... 26 Section One: Individual Harm Attribution Strategies ...... 28 Section Two: Simple Kantian Strategies ...... 37 Section Three: Virtue-Based Strategies ...... 43 Section Four: Complicity-Based Strategies...... 48 Section Five: The Collectivist Strategy ...... 52 Concluding Remarks ...... 58 3 Climate Change and Distributive Justice ...... 59 Introduction ...... 59 Section One: Re-Framing the Moral Problem ...... 60 Section Two: A Theory that Recognizes the Importance of Collective Institutions ...... 69 Section Three: A Theory that Captures the Distribution of Collective Institutional Responsibility ...... 70 Section Four: A Theory that Explains Pre-Institutional Responsibility...... 73 Section Five: Historical Continuity ...... 76 Concluding Remarks ...... 80 4 Distributive Justice and Pre-Institutional Duties Regarding the Use of Atmospheric Absorptive Capacity ..... 82 Introduction ...... 82 Section One: The Lockean Model of Norms of Pre-institutional Resource Use ...... 85 Section Two: The Kantian Model of Norms of Pre-institutional Resource Use ...... 92 Section Three: Locke, Kant, and AAC ...... 97 Section Four: Demandingness and Priority to Disgorge ...... 112 Section Five: The Normative Role and Authority of Institutions ...... 120 Concluding Remarks ...... 124 5 Distributive Justice and Individual Duties to Create Just Climate Institutions ...... 126 Introduction ...... 126 Section One: Justifying Individual Duties to Participate in the Creation of Just Climate Institutions ...... 127 Section Two: Duty to Collectivize as Adopting an End ...... 132 Section Three: Upper Limits on Requirements for Adopting the End ...... 136 Section Four: Lower Bounds on Requirements for Adopting the End ...... 137 Section Five: Guidance for Context Sensitive Requirements ...... 142 Section Six: Redundancy ...... 153 Section Seven: Noncompliance ...... 156 Concluding Remarks ...... 164 Bibliography ...... 166

Climate Change and Individual Morality: A Central Tension

“The dinosaurs never saw that asteroid coming…what’s our excuse?” – Neil deGrasse Tyson, Cosmos Introduction

Climate change is gaining traction as one of the most pressing moral issues of our time (if not the most). Without significant and rapid intervention, in the coming years, much of the world’s foreseeable and avoidable suffering, deprivation, forced relocation, and early death (from disease, drought, hunger, rising seas, resource wars, etc.) will result from the effects of anthropogenic climate change.

That these effects are bad and should be avoided to the extent possible is not a particularly controversial or interesting moral position. But explaining where the responsibility to avoid such effects rests, why it does so, and what it amounts to is a far more difficult and intriguing task philosophically—and it is the one I take up in this dissertation as

I explore what taking seriously climate change as a moral issue means for how we can justifiably live our lives. I ultimately develop and account of the morality of climate change by pursuing a particular kind of theory of global distributive justice, which frames the moral problem of climate change in a particular way and which is uniquely suited to accomplish a number of important tasks that I think an adequate theory of climate morality needs to do, and it does so in a unified way.

Before I can develop and defend that account of the morality of climate change in the coming chapters, this short opening chapter will be dedicated to spelling out the ways in which the task of explaining and articulating moral responsibility to abate the impending effects of climate change is so philosophically troubling. I will argue that the traditional

1 model of individual responsibility—which conceives of individuals as being responsible only for intentional actions that either can be directly causally traced to particular avoidable harms, or which in themselves constitute rights violations—is in significant tension with the prospect of an account of individual moral responsibility in the context of climate change because of the particular structure of how the badness of climate change is produced. It is a moral problem that is a function of the aggregation of many individually innocuous seeming actions. This tension makes it difficult to explain why any particular individual would have a duty to act differently. But if we cannot adequately explain that duty for any individual, then we are at risk of losing the ability to assert truly that there is a moral imperative to avoid the bad effects of climate change, which was our obvious, uninteresting, and uncontroversial starting point.

I begin this chapter in Section One by briefly laying bare an orthodox and commonsense conception about moral responsibility. In Section Two I move to explain the structure that produces the impending range of wide-sweeping climate harms by human agents across time. In Section Three, I proceed to show that our commonsense conception about moral responsibility struggles to fit neatly with this structure. I then pitch the stakes of the philosophical state of tension that we seem to find ourselves in, because when conjoined with another common philosophical position, which claims that individual agents are the only ultimate bearers of responsibility, we seem to be at risk of losing any way of morally condemning the obvious harms of climate change in a way that is different than a random asteroid strike. Finally, in Section Four, I step back to discuss a few meta-ethical points while characterizing the overall kind of project that generates the aforementioned tension, to pave the way for evaluating possible responses to it.

Section One: A Commonsense Conception of Individual Responsibility

A widely accepted and orthodox view of moral responsibility for wrongdoing is that individual moral agents are responsible only for intentional actions that either can be directly causally traced to particular harms which could have been avoided had they acted differently, or which in themselves constitute rights violations. In this section I offer a sketch of some of the main components and commitments of this general view. Doing so in such a brief manner will deliberately skirt a number of significant controversies, but the rough and ready view will be enough to shed light on significant prima facie tensions accommodating an account of the individual morality of climate change within this commonsense model.

To be a candidate for ascriptions of moral responsibility, minimally one must be a moral agent. When my cat, Blitz, knocks over the family heirloom he is not morally responsible, even though his physical movements caused the heirloom to break and, counterfactually, had he not physically moved in that way the vase wouldn’t have broken.

Moral responsibility attaches to agents that are capable of pulling off actions, rather than non-agents exhibiting mere causal behavior. We need not wade too far into the philosophy of action, or theories of agency, to recognize this general distinction and feel its pull in the moral domain. Following Donald Davidson’s lead, it is common to think that actions that are candidates for judgments of moral responsibility (of the form “X is responsible for X”) must be intentional in some sense.1 While specifying what counts as “intentional” under some description, in general or in specific cases, can admittedly be difficult, it plausibly requires certain physiological and mental capacities. This will certainly include conscious awareness, but also abilities for practical deliberation such as the ability to conceptualize something as an end and to direct one’s behavior towards it, or the ability to evaluate and act

1 Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).

3 on the basis of reasons, etc.2 The inevitable difficulties in fully clarifying an account of these features does not take away the general point that it is with moral agents and intentional actions that we are standardly concerned when discussing moral responsibility.

The first major aspect of the traditional view of moral responsibility concerns responsibility for harms. When ascribing responsibility for harms we look for a direct causal connection from a moral agent’s intentional action through to the production of particular harms—whether one steals a hat, smacks another on the head, or hurls an insult. Of course this doesn’t always mean that personally causing the harm is necessary; those who order and enable harms might be just as responsible as the causal agent (sometimes more so than the direct causal agents). But in such cases there is still a clear, linear causal chain connecting the enabler to the harm. If someone is clearly not part of the causal story of the production of some harm, it seems very unintuitive to think that they could possibly be on the hook morally for it.3 This suggests an initial formal criterion which characterizes the commonsense view:

Causal Connection Criterion: An agent, S, is responsible for a harm only if S’s action is causally implicated in that harm’s realization.

While recognized as necessary, this alone is clearly not sufficient to capture our commonsense responsibility ascriptions. Even if, under some description, someone’s action could be construed as “part of the causal story” of the production of some harm, it is a fairly

2 Philip Pettit suggests three necessary conditions for appropriateness of responsibility ascriptions regarding an individual’s action: Value relevance — He or she is an autonomous agent and faces a value relevant choice involving the possibility of doing something good or bad or right or wrong. Value judgment — The agent has the understanding and access to evidence required for being able to make judgments about the relative value of such options. Value sensitivity — The person has the control necessary for being able to choose between options on the basis of judgments about their value. See his “Responsibility Incorporated,” Ethics 117 (2) (2007): 171-201. 3 I take my lead in characterizing many aspects of the traditional model of responsibility from Christopher Kutz and will return to his attempt to revise the traditional model later. See his Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

4 natural assumption to think that if the same harm would occur regardless of what one does, then one cannot be responsible for it. If an act cannot make a difference to an outcome, it is not obvious to see how it could matter morally or prudentially with respect to what one had reason to do. Why should it be part of the moral analysis at all? This suggests another formal criterion of the commonsense view, which can be put schematically:

Causal Difference Criterion: An agent, S, is only responsible for a harm if S’s action makes a causal difference to that harm’s realization.

However, even this criterion is not yet sufficient to capture our commonsense view of moral responsibility. Even if my action made a difference to the harm’s realization to meet this second criterion, if by force of circumstance I couldn’t have done otherwise, or if I was being coerced such that I didn’t have substantial control over whether the harm occurred through my action, we tend to mitigate claims of moral responsibility.4 This suggests a third formal criterion of the orthodox view:

Control Criterion: S is only responsible for outcomes over which S has substantial autonomous control, and whose occurrence S could have prevented without undue burden.

In the wake of this idea, we can make explicit one more element of the orthodox conception in a more formal way:

Independence Criterion: S is not responsible for the harm R brings about unless S has induced or coerced R into action.

Holding someone responsible for the actions of another, unless they have unduly influenced that person into action by force or fraud, seems to be a paradigm case of injustice and unfairness. H.D. Lewis went as far as to call the idea of holding one individual responsible for the actions of another “barbarous”.5 Doing so, as the common phrase now goes, would

4 For some complications see Harry Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person.” The Journal of Philosophy (1971): 5-20 and “Identification and Wholeheartedness,” in The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 5 H.D. Lewis, “Collective Responsibility,” Philosophy, 24 (1948): 3-18, p. 6.

5 fail to take seriously the separateness of persons. It is the very reason why we shudder at the idea of sacrificing some bystander to the angry mob to appease them. We are each, it seems, responsible for our own conduct, authors of our own lives and alone answerable for deeds that emanate from our agency.

These conditions are stated generally so as to deliberately include the possibility of an individual’s behavior being an omission from action. Sometimes we hold people responsible for negligent omissions from acting. Likewise, it is perfectly consistent to say that someone

“made a difference” to a harm’s realization, or was “in control”, or “could have prevented the harm” whether by action or omission.

Even if there is toying around the edges, there seems to be considerable convergence that something close to the preceding account supplies minimum necessary conditions for ascribing responsibility for harm.

As mentioned at the outset, the rough and ready orthodox view distinguishes between the above conception of responsibility for harms and responsibility for harmless rights violations. To get a sense of what might constitute a rights violation but not a harm, and why the orthodox view of responsibility is right to include both, consider the following case:

Discriminatory Hiring: A department chair is making hiring decisions. He has two candidates in front of him, one African American and the other white. The chair offers the job to the less qualified candidate simply and deliberately because he is white. Now, stipulate that the African American candidate already has the job of her dreams lined up, and would have turned this job down had she been offered it. She is not harmed or made worse off (stipulate too that nobody ever finds out the decision procedure). And imagine that the white candidate had no other job offers, and his life would have taken a serious turn for the worse.

It seems quite clear, even in the absence of any harm done, the action was wrong. It constituted a rights violation, ought to be condemned, and it is something that the chair can properly be held responsible for under our commonsense theory of moral responsibility.

There are likely to be analogues of the formal criteria for causing harm in the case of rights violations, for instance if the chair person was coerced by the college dean into discriminatory hiring, but I will not further detail those here.

However it is worth adding a few more thoughts to wrap up our sketch of the commonsense understanding of moral responsibility. Even restricting ourselves to the class of moral agents, acting intentionally, where their action constitutes a rights violation, or makes a difference to realizing a harm that they could have prevented, often we take individual moral responsibility to require a person’s having not just any intention, but some malevolent intention or bad maxim from which they are acting. Mere causal responsibility, even from an agent acting intentionally under some description, often does not translate to moral responsibility. For example, I am morally responsible for your broken arm if I swung the bat that broke it in order to steal your new sneakers. However, if my follow-through breaks the catcher’s arm, though I am causally responsible for the break, I am not morally responsible for it.6 I have intentionally acted in swinging the bat, and that action can be directly causally traced to a particular harm, which could have been avoided had I acted differently, but we do not take me to be morally responsible or blameworthy. We think that an unfortunate thing has happened, but it without its being anybody’s fault or anyone being morally implicated.

If that example strikes someone as a matter that is too “unintentional” to serve the point, there are others could do so just as easily. For instance, an agent’s epistemic situation

6 The intuition that I am not morally responsible for the break doesn’t depend on the catcher’s voluntarily having assumed the risk. If some bystander is forced to fill in without knowing the risks, we would still think that I am not morally responsible for breaking the bystander’s arm and the reason depends on its being an unintentional accident.

7 can matter to the appropriateness of ascriptions of moral responsibility.7 Not knowing important information, even if all of the other elements are in play, where one clearly intends to do the action in question (on the basis of one’s misinformation), can often mitigate moral responsibility for a harmful outcome.

There are obviously some exceptions where we hold people responsible for unintended consequences if harms are significant. We call this “strict liability”.8 Similarly, concerning epistemic excusing conditions, we recognize that not all forms of ignorance serve to mitigate responsibility. If a person should have known certain harmful consequences were likely, acting out of ignorance cannot serve as an excusing condition. Our name for this is, familiarly, “culpable ignorance”. If one consciously disregards “a substantial risk of serious harm”, or if one is recklessly negligent, or fails to take precautions that a “reasonable person” would take, there is room enough in the traditional conception of moral responsibility to consider one responsible and blameworthy.9

Section Two: The Dangers and Structure of Climate Change

Naturally, the preceding account of the commonsense model of moral responsibility is just a sketch that barely scratches the surface and ignores many potential controversies and complications. But having a rough idea of the terrain will be enough to reveal important implications and tensions when adjacent the features of climate harms, to which I now turn.

I will first review a now familiar and general depiction of the pervasiveness and magnitude of

7 As can, of course, the epistemic situation of those the agent is interacting with (e.g., if you are the world’s leading expert in some field and I try to lecture you about it, your epistemic situation might warrant ascribing rudeness or disrespect to me. 8 This indicates a distinction we might offer between ‘holding responsible’ and ‘ascribing responsibility’. One way of conceiving of the strict liability case is to think of it as holding responsible without ascribing responsibility, but instead ‘ascribing liability’. We might wonder, following this line, whether it is deceptive to even think of it as ‘holding responsible’ or if we need to introduce a new concept, ‘holding liable’. I think the conceptual space here is ambiguous and it is not clear to me that every instance of strict liability is a mere ‘holding responsible’ while withholding ‘ascribing responsibility’. 9 Dale Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

8 prospective climate harms. Then I will proceed to describe the relevant moral facts as to how those harms come to be.

One needn’t take more than a cursory look at the fifth, and most recent, assessment report (AR5) from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to understand the severity of the projected impact of un-mitigated climate change on human life and the earth’s natural systems.10 Millions of people already are facing threats to their most basic human needs including food, water, shelter, basic healthcare, which will only continue to be exacerbated.11

Changing precipitation patterns and melting snow and ice will cause regional alterations to hydrological systems and thereby affect quantity and quality of water resources.12 Destabilizing droughts and floods will increase in both number and severity. Sea level rise and increased extreme weather events threaten coastal areas—their infrastructure, industry, water quality, and inhabitants livelihoods. Heat waves, cyclones, and wildfires will alter ecosystems, disrupt food production and water availability, damage infrastructure, increase morbidity and mortality. Temperature and precipitation changes have already and will continue to alter the distribution of water-borne illnesses and disease vectors. The geographic range, seasonal activities, species interactions and population numbers of

10 See IPCC 2014, “Summary for Policymakers”, Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, [Field, C.B., V.R. Barros, D.J. Dokken, K.J. Mach, M.D. Mastrandrea, T.E. Bilir, M. Chatterjee, K.L. Ebi, Y.O. Estrada, R.C. Genova, B. Girma, E.S. Kissel, A.N. Levy, S. MacCracken, P.R. Mastrandrea, and L.L. White (eds.)], (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 1- 32, http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg2/ar5_wgII_spm_en.pdf 11 The WHO estimates that climate change is already causing more than 150,000 deaths per year. See World Health Organization, “Climate Change”, Health and Environment Linkages Initiative (HELI), accessed August 23, 2017, http://www.who.int/heli/risks/climate/climatechange/en. The estimate is controversial, as it is hard to pin damages down to climate change per se, but it is suggestive and the figure will only get worse and with better confidence as time passes. 12 Not to mention feedback loops like that predicted with permafrost thaw. See Andrew MacDougall, et al., “Significant Contribution to Climate Warming from the Permafrost Carbon Feedback,” Nature Geoscience 5 (2012): 719–721.

9 terrestrial, freshwater, and marine species have shifted and will continue to do so, putting fisheries, ecosystems, and all those that depend on their services at threat of collapse. The recent Living Planet report by the World Wildlife Fund reports that their “Living Planet Index

(LPI), which measures more than 10,000 representative populations of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish, has declined by 52 per cent since 1970. Put another way, in less than two human generations, population sizes of vertebrate species have dropped by half.”13

In addition to dramatic losses in total population numbers, loss of biodiversity, which is occurring at between 1,000-10,000 the natural baseline rate, threatens the underpinnings of ecosystems and their services, from pollination to soil regeneration and beyond.

Negative impacts on crop yields are expected to continue, especially in lower latitudes, dry, and tropical regions; impacts on maize and wheat have already been observed.

In some African countries, 50% decreases in yields are possible. With such impacts, basic food security is at risk at global scale.

All of these impacts have the prospect of leading to what Dale Jamieson calls “third order impacts” on the global social, political, and economic order, which include exacerbated geopolitical issues, such as resource conflicts and rivalries and political instability from mass migrations.14 In a number of places the UNHRC has offered estimates as high as 1 billion people that will be obliged to move based on climate change or environmental degradation by 2050.15 As a point of comparison, in 2015 the total (not just newly displaced) number of

13 See WWF, “Living Planet Report 2016. Risk and resilience in a new era,” WWF International (Gland, Switzerland, 2016), accessible at http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/all_publications/living_planet_report/ 14 Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time, p. 103. First order being sea level rise, increased frequency of droughts, storms, and extreme temperatures. Second order being the resultant species extinctions, changes in agricultural patterns, disease outbreaks, etc. 15 UNHCR, “Climate Change, Migration and Displacement: Who will be affected?” Working Paper of the Inter- Agency Standing Committee, accessed August 23, 2017, http://www.unhcr.org/afr/protection/environment/4a1e4fb42/climate-change-migration-displacement- affected-working-paper-submitted.html and L. Craig Johnstone, “The Climate Change Future is Now,” Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees address to the Institute of Public Policy Research Conference Climate

IDPs from armed conflict was 38 million.16 High ranking public officials and military personnel agree that climate change “will cripple the security environment.”17

Adding an extra layer of moral seriousness to such harms, it is those already disadvantaged and marginalized, whether socially, economically, politically or otherwise, who are particularly vulnerable to climate impacts—the urban and rural poor, subsistence farmers, coastal populations, native peoples, low-lying island nations, underdeveloped nations, etc.

With just that cursory glance, the threats to humans and natural systems should be clear. With them in mind, we can move to the core of this section. In the introduction, I intimated that significant tension climate change poses to matters of moral responsibility involves how such impacts arise. In the rest of this section I sketch such a picture.

Anthropogenic climate change is caused by a remarkable system of factors and complex causal processes that depend on the unintentional, uncoordinated, and individually innocuous ordinary behavior of millions of people. Our energy supply, industry, land-use conversion, agriculture, transportation, residences, and waste processes all emit greenhouse gasses (GHGs) in vast quantities. GHGs are gases in the atmosphere that allow radiation in the form of direct sunlight to reach and heat the Earth, but which absorb and trap radiation

(heat) in the infrared spectrum from being re-radiated from the surface back to space. We hear most about carbon dioxide and methane but other GHGs include water vapor, and

Change and Forced Migration, April 2008, accessed August 23, 2017, http://www.unhcr.org/cgi- bin/texis/vtx/search?page=search&docid=4901e8e82&query=climate%20refugees. 16 This is of course shamefully and astoundingly high. See Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, “Global Overview 2015: People Internally Displaced by Conflict and Violence,” Norwegian Refugee Council (Geneva, Switzerland, 2015), accessible, http://www.internal-displacement.org/assets/library/Media/201505-Global- Overview-2015/20150506-global-overview-2015-en.pdf. 17 See, e.g., Sec John Kerry, “The Gathering Storm,” Huffington Post, October 9, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johnkerry/the-gathering-storm_b_5962026.html and a report which pitches climate change as a “threat multiplier” by the Military Advisory Board, “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change,” CAN Corporation (Alexandria, VA: 2007), accessible http://www.cna.org/sites/default/files/news/FlipBooks/Climate%20Change%20web/flipviewerxpress.html.

11 even less often discussed, nitrous oxide, chlorofluorocarbons, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride.18

While it is conceptually possible that we could have similar climate forcing effects as a result of a few individual people or decisions that we could pin the effects on certain individuals using the mechanisms of the orthodox view of moral responsibility described above, that is not our world.

In our world, virtually everyone is involved in the fundamental emission-requiring behaviors that aggregate to levels sufficient to alter earth’s natural systems. We drive and rely on fossil fuel transported goods. We fly around the world. The meat-based diets so many are accustomed to require significant GHG emissions. We heat and power our homes with carbon heavy processes. We consume innumerable products, build and use massive infrastructures that all require GHGs. People have been doing so since the industrial revolution and will continue doing so into the future all around the globe.

Such actions add to the overall atmospheric stock of GHGs which aggregate together to surpass the atmosphere’s limit to store GHGs without dangerous climate change, and thereby translate into the impacts diagrammed above. I will discuss the physical processes and empirical situation more in Chapter Three, but this mere glimpse is enough to set up the fundamental tension of climate change and notions of individual responsibility.

Section Three: Clarifying the Tension

We sit in a position of remarkable practical and theoretical discomfort with respect to climate change. These two kinds of discomfort mutually reinforce each other. At the

18 The new administration is updating the EPAs website and currently does not include this information, but an archived version of the EPAs website from Jan. 19th, 2017 has an accessible breakdown of the sources and uses of GHGs. Environmental Protection Agency, “Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions”, accessed August 23, 2017, https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/ghgemissions_.html.

12 practical level, most simply put, people are still swimming trying to figure out what their duties might be, and what to do to discharge such duties if they exist. Environmental activists, climate scientists, moral theorists, policy makers, and lay people alike struggle with defining their personal commitments, their sense of felt obligation, and their readiness to demand such obligations of others. We make fledgling efforts to reduce emissions, within the bounds of comfort, but without much sense of what the bare minimum that’s actually required is, what would be supererogatory, etc. This lack of practical guidance is partly explained by the uneasy theoretical terrain discussed in what follows—the difficulty with which our best theories of moral responsibility have coming to consensus about moral imperatives. Symmetrically, inevitably we come to theorizing with a range of practical commitments and assumptions that guide investigation. If those practical commitments are scattered, unclear, or conflicting, the chaos can easily make its way into the theoretical project of trying to make sense of responsibilities.

With that prefatory note, we can now begin to piece together an account of why the impacts of climate change, produced in the way they are, play havoc with our orthodox conceptions of moral responsibility and why, as Jamieson poetically puts it, the effects of climate change “swamp the machinery of morality, at least as it currently manifests in our moral consciousness”.19

First, because the harms are a function of the total stock of GHGs in the atmosphere, and that stock is produced by billions of people across the globe and through time, any individual’s contributory share is infinitesimally small. Even those who live the most lavish, profligate lives have a share that is likely inconsequential or negligible with respect to producing harm. None of the contributors, it seems, would individually make any

19 Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time, p. 144.

13 morally relevant difference to the realization or avoidance of the harms, no matter how much any agent changes his or her behavior. As Walter Sinnott-Armstrong puts it, “No storms or droughts or heat waves can be traced to my individual act of driving”.20 Even if you consider one’s whole lifetime of actions, it seems neither necessary nor sufficient for the realization of the same bevy of global climate harms. This means straightforwardly that the

Difference Criterion and Control Criterion isolated above are not met for individuals with respect to climate change. Individuals neither make a morally relevant difference to the totality of climate harms, nor could they prevent them by acting differently (by, say, unilaterally stopping GHG emissions). If changing one’s behavior won’t make a difference to the realization of any harms, it can be very hard to see why one might have any reason to do it. Doing so would take on the appearance of pure sacrifice. One needn’t be evil, or short-sighted, or selfish to think along these lines.

But the discomfort runs much deeper as well. As Baylor Johnson notes,

“this is not a problem in which every individual act is harmful and the total of all these harmful acts is dreadful. Rather, individual acts are harmless in themselves, but harmful in aggregate.”21

It isn’t just that the sum total of climate harms will be the same regardless of what any individual emits, but there also don’t seem to be any particular harms tied to such emissions. There is nothing intrinsically harmful or wrongful with emitting GHGs. They do not seem to be the right kind of candidate actions for “constituting a rights violation”, like the discriminatory hiring case. After all, we can reasonably ask, “whose rights am I

20 Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, “It’s Not My Fault: Global Warming and Individual Moral Obligations,” in W. Sinnott-Armstrong and R. B. Howarth (eds.) Perspectives on Climate Change: Science, Economics, Politics, Ethics: Advances in the Economics of Environmental Research, Vol. 5. (Amsterdam: Elsevier JAI, 2005), 285–309, p. 291. 21 Baylor Johnson, “Ethical Obligations in a Tragedy of the Commons.” Environmental Values, 12.3 (2003): 271- 287.

14 violating?”, and seem to come up empty handed.22 If the cumulative threshold isn’t hit, my own emissions will likely be a net benefit, given the valuable goods that emissions contribute to realizing.23

Likewise, of course, emissions are nearly all non-maliciously produced. They are produced in the process of living a life and in service of morally important, valuable, and meaningful ends; flying to a friend’s wedding, raising one’s kids, producing music, etc. Not only do emissions not seem to meet the often required mal-intent conditions, so too it is hard to conceive of them as satisfying the weaker standards of reckless negligence, or unreasonableness. The individual inconsequentiality seems to undercut charges of reckless negligence. And the way we conceive of the “reasonable person” standard, it isn’t even a question, there isn’t even a choice, about whether one should stay home to conserve emissions instead of flying to the family Thanksgiving celebration. Of course one goes.

For the same reasons as stated above, it is hard to conceive of any individual’s emissions as fitting the strict liability exception, where we hold people accountable simply in virtue of unintentional harmful consequences. The causal influence is too tenuous.

And in fact the causal influence is even harder to make out than I have been leading on. First, in our orthodox view of moral responsibility we saw that we are most comfortable talking about particular harms to particular individuals. Our ordinary conceptions of responsibility are well calibrated to harms and causes that are individual, that “can be readily

22 Simon Caney has done productive work articulating why climate change can be understood as violating fundamental rights. But none of that seems to translate down to any individual violating any other’s rights. This generates a puzzle for how to make sense of the rights violations, in the first place, and what they mean at scale for individual moral actors. See for instance, Caney, “Human Rights, Responsibilities, and Climate Change,” in Charles R. Beitz & Robert E. Goodin (eds.), Global Basic Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 227-247. I will come back to this point with the theory of climate morality that I ultimately develop. 23 To some degree this can be said even of the sum total emissions, if it were to fall short enough of the dangerous climate thresholds. Although of course there are some significant dangers that come well before the oft-quoted 2°C mark.

15 identified, and that…are local in time and space.”24 This is simply not the case with respect to climate change. Emissions distribute uniformly in the atmosphere so there is no interesting relationship between who is doing the emitting and where they are doing it with who is suffering and where they are. The causes and effects of climate change are

“geographically and temporally unbounded.”25

Second, due to the temporal reach of climate change (if we hit thresholds of total emissions and atmospheric concentrations to achieve 2°C mean temperature increases over pre-industrial averages, it will take millennia for global mean temperature to revert) many of those who will suffer most do not yet exist, which brings along a nest of issues in itself and the ghost of Parfit. But even if we restrict ourselves to the burden bearers that do currently exist, or who will exist in the near term, but whose identities are not dependent on our climate policy choices (as I will do…and there are likely to be many of them without radical changes), we can’t plausibly trace my emissions to any particular harms.

Yet one more complication for matching up the way climate harms are produced and our standard conceptions of moral responsibility is that emissions have lifespans in the atmosphere ranging from a few years in methane to millennia for tetrafluoromethane.

Carbon dioxide molecules may stay in the atmosphere for centuries or longer.26 The rest will be taken up in the biosphere or absorbed in the ocean over time, but with a “long tail”. Of course when this happens with increasing pace, other molecules are forced back to the atmosphere allowing for steady accumulation, but some will stay buried in the depths of the

24 Dale Jamieson, “Ethics, Public Policy, and Global Warming,” in S. M. Gardiner, S. Caney, D. Jamieson and H. Shue (eds), Climate Ethics: Essential Readings, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 83. 25 Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time, p. 102. 26 For a simple account of some of the science see Zeke Hausfather, “Common Climate Misconceptions: Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide,” Yale Climate Connections, December 16, 2010, https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2010/12/common-climate-misconceptions-atmospheric-carbon- dioxide/.

16 oceans for millennia.27 So when some of the worst climate change effects are happening, it is possible that some of my carbon is no longer in the atmosphere. This means that tracking any individual’s emissions to find the murder weapon, so to speak, is an impossible task. But to be able to make reasonable claims about individuals causing harm, it seems we would need to trace individual emissions through all of these geophysical transformations through to the increased atmospheric concentrations at a given time to produce a warming effect, through to the meteorological effects, through to the harms. This seems like a fool’s errand.

In sum, we might follow Jamieson in putting it this way,

“the distance from my particular acts to the damages that occur is far greater on several dimensions than in the cases that commonsense morality normally confronts”.28

I think the preceding paragraphs make a good prima facie case that climate change puts us in an uncomfortable spot and is at tension with our traditional conceptions of moral responsibility.29

And yet, things can get worse. Because at the same time as these difficulties for making sense of individual responsibility begin to surface, a core commitment by many philosophers is that the only possible bearers of moral responsibility are individuals, not groups or collectives. Call this thesis methodological individualism.30 The reasons for adopting such a view are many, but the main thrust is that individuals have some property that is necessary for ascriptions of moral responsibility that collectives lack. R.S. Downie spells it

27 Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time, ch. 5. 28 Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time, p. 164. 29 In the next chapter I consider some attempts to salvage a conception of harm that would apply to this kind of circumstance. 30 See Kutz, Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age, Max Weber, Economy and Society, Vol. 1, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), Lewis “Collective Responsibility”, J.W.N. Watkins, “Methodological Individualism and Social Tendencies,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 8 (1957): 104-117. R.S. Downie, “Collective Responsibility” Philosophy 44 (1969): pp. 66-69, Alvin Goldman, A Theory of Human Action, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), Stephen Sverdlik, “Collective Responsibility,” Philosophical Studies 51(1987): 61-76. J. Angelo Corlett, “Collective Moral Responsibility,” Journal of Social Philosophy, 32: 573–584 (2001), Jan Narveson, “Collective Responsibility,” Journal of Ethics 6 (2002): 179-198.

17 out thusly: “Collectives do not have moral faults, since they don’t make moral choices, and hence they cannot properly be ascribed moral responsibility…For there to be moral responsibility there must be blameworthiness involving a morally faulty decision, and this can only occur at the individual level.”31 Jan Narveson makes a similar point by challenging the conceptual possibility of ascribing agency to groups. The bearers of moral responsibility, and those liable to praise or blame, have to be individuals, because individuals are the only things that can have moral agency. Just as with the case above ruling out my cat Blitz from moral responsibility for knocking over the family heirloom, in virtue of his lack of agency,

Narveson claims that without agency, nothing “can literally be the bearer of full responsibility”.32

Similarly, denying methodological individualism amounts to, among other things, denying the Independence Criterion of the orthodox view, which would allow an individual to be held responsible for the actions of others, which as we saw above some have thought to be unjust, unfair, and perhaps even barbarous.

On the whole, methodological individualists are skeptical of group intentions and genuinely collective action that are distinct from, and that cannot be understood as a function of and reducible to, the aggregate intentions and actions of a number of individuals.

They question the theoretical basis for countenancing facts about this kind of collective mentality, admitting them into our ontology and best theories of explanation. Individualists will allow that we might speak of collective mental features, but that when we are doing so it is merely metaphorical and won’t survive our final analysis. Instead, the metaphorical language is explained away in virtue of deep psychological tendencies to see the world in

31 Downie, “Collective Responsibility”, p. 67. 32 Narveson, “Collective Responsibility”, p. 179.

18 psychologically explanatory terms, over attributing mentality, like saying that the tree

“wants” to grow, or “loves” the sunshine.

Of course methodological individualism is subject to scrutiny in the collective responsibility literature.33 I will say more about this dispute in the next chapter, but without settling the issue here, we can see what the stakes are for our discussion were methodological individualism, a widely held position, to be true.

If methodological individualism is true, for any moral problem, any responsibility for it needs to ground out in terms of individuals having responsibilities to act differently. But if we can’t make sense of individual responsibilities, as the case seems to be with respect to climate change laid out above, then there can’t be any moral responsibilities in this domain and we are forced into silence regarding imperatives to avoid the badness of climate change.

These features come together, our orthodox understandings of moral responsibility, the structure of climate change, and methodological individualism, to generate skepticism about moral responsibility for climate change.

This seems deeply unappealing. For one, losing responsibility in this way puts these avoidable, predictable, anthropogenically caused collective harms on a moral par with “real” natural, inevitable disasters like (non-fracking) earthquakes or a freak asteroid collision. But intuitively these two kinds of harms ought not to share the same analysis. It seems there is a

“Moorean shift” type of argument to give in response to the tension. The negation of the

33 David Cooper, “Collective Responsibility,” Philosophy, 43 (1968): 258-268, and Deborah Tollefsen, “The Rationality of Collective Guilt”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 30 (1) (2006): 222-239 both think, for instance, that the fact that we do in practice seem to ascribe responsibility to groups and blame them regularly and that we feel a full range of moral emotional responses to collectives (resentment, indignation, pride) is evidence for establishing that they are appropriate targets of moral criticism. Cooper also thinks that because we make the claims of groups, but groups have varying membership, we must be making claims that are not reducible to the individuals comprising the collective. Peter French gives another criticism of individualism by pointing out that there are predicates that can only be applied to collectives, like the team “won the game”. Peter French (ed.), Individual and Collective Responsibility, (Rochester, VT: Schenkman, 1998), p. 37.

19 conclusion is more plausible than any case one could make for the premises. We should have more confidence in the claim that the avoidable suffering from climate change is morally wrong, and somehow or another ought to be avoided, than we should in any of the theoretical commitments to the theories that cause the tension that threatens to remove our ability to make such claims force us to give up on moral responsibilities in this domain.

This general sense, then, is what merits looking for a way to respond to this fundamental tension, either by 1) dissolving it to show that we can actually preserve our traditional ways of understanding individual morality and, using its resources, salvage claims about moral imperatives and individual morality in the climate domain, or 2) revising

(perhaps radically) our traditional ways of understanding individual morality in order to redeem it in the climate domain34, or 3) abandoning the requirement to give to give an account of climate morality at the individual level and instead shift the analysis to the level of collectives.

Section Four: A Meta-Ethical Clarification

Before I go on to canvass strategies to resolve this tension and ease our theoretical discomfort with respect to responsibility and climate change,35 on the way to developing and defending my own view, in this section I want to pause briefly to discuss what kind of project it is to point out our discomfort in the way I have above. Getting clear on this will help send us on the path towards resolving the tension, recovering practical guidance, and allocating responsibility to avert climate harms.

34 Jamieson thinks of this option as undertaking “persuasive definition”. Arguing for a revision or wholesale replacement of a conceptual framework is a very different task than attempting to show that from within a preexisting framework, certain theoretical work can be done. 35 And perhaps that of our practical discomfort, though I’ll let the reader be the judge of that…as the account I defend does have some uncomfortable and demanding implications.

There are two interpretations of the story that I’ve given, one much more threatening than the other. The first is a descriptive project about our conceptions of responsibility. The second is a normative project about what, in fact, responsibility consists in. The two projects might be related but it is important to at least be aware of precisely what is going on.

A number of scholars have attempted to give a genealogical, evolutionary explanation for why our orthodox conception of morality has the shape it does which excludes (or at least makes difficult) the climate case.36 They claim, generally, that it is no surprise that we are in such discomfort practically and theoretically. This is because our basic moral-conceptual frameworks and the origins of our moral psychologies evolved in very different settings, for the purposes of coping with radically different types of problems. They evolved in small, close-knit groups where our socially significant impacts were remarkably local and easily identifiable; where resources were essentially abundant (and atmospheric space inexhaustible). Morality and moral psychologies in these settings developed to easily track individual harms and the direct causal channels that produce them. It provides us with mechanisms to feel bad when we cause identifiable harm, punish those that do similar, defend our group against local and immediate threats. But our social world is vastly different.

There are billions of us, now closely connected through a world of technology and social, political, and economic institutions. Our actions have reach extending beyond our sight lines. The threats aren’t anymore always local nor are they immediate. Focusing on those aspects hides the overall harms. It either doesn’t engage our affective systems crucial to motivate us in small-scale interpersonal contexts or simply overwhelms them with a sense of

36 See Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson, Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them, (NY: Penguin Press, 2013), and Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time.

21 powerlessness and incomprehensibility.37 Our systems of moral cognition are not good at tracking, say, distant harms, or future harms, or statistical harms, or probabilistic harms.

I think we can see these moral psychological remnants from our evolutionarily early years readily. We are good at tracking departures from the background pattern of normal activity.38 Someone stealing from your house, or someone knocking you on the head stands out in relief. We feel a range of Strawsonian reactive attitudes when confronted with such behavior.39 We blame them; we hold them to account in formal in and informal ways. But it barely registers to imagine that my flying to see my family for Thanksgiving might play a role, when many others are doing the same, on somebody in Central Africa in a few generations. We certainly do not feel resentment at the fact. When we begin to concern ourselves with emissions, which are part of the background of everyday life, we no longer have a grip on what is background and what stands out. Everything is moralized, not just the obvious disruptions from the ordinary flow of affairs like in small-scale, one-off, individual harms.

Now, of course, these are just psychological descriptions about how the world shows up, what we focus on, what we tend to feel moral emotions about and what we tend to be

37 Of course, Savulescu takes these points to imply that we need biomedical moral enhancement to solve the problems, which we are evolutionarily pre-programmed to fail to solve. We don’t have to follow him to recognize the potential importance of the evolutionary story. 38 See Iris Marion Young, “Responsibility and Global Justice: A Social Connection Model,” Social Philosophy and Policy 23 (1) (2006): 102-130, and Samuel Scheffler, “Individual Responsibility in a Global Age,” Social Philosophy and Policy 12 (1995): 219-36. Scheffler is not dealing with climate change, per se, but globalization more generally. He points out that the phenomenology of agency (which privileges acts over omissions, near effects over far, etc.) is increasingly a poor guide to dimensions of human action that are socially significant. There are huge pressures to change the way we understand and imagine ourselves and our responsibilities. With new social relations, with a crowded world of linked fates, with our lives structured to large degree by bureaucracies and institutions that have profound effects distant lives, where economic developments here are huge determiners of wellbeing there, where environmental impacts distribute across boundaries, etc., something has to change in our conception of moral responsibility. I take the project of this dissertation to be cut from the same cloth. 39 Peter Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” Proceedings of the British Academy 48 (1962): 1-25 and R. Jay Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

22 blind to and unresponsive to. They might serve as partial explanations for how we got to the dangerous point that we are in, or why we are failing to act now. And they might shed light on difficulties we will face in trying to get out of the crisis. That is, they might illuminate our practical failings.

But, as psychological descriptions of what we think is significant, what we take responsibility to consist in, what we consider blameworthy, they do not show us that moral responsibility doesn’t attach to emission heavy behaviors, or that blame isn’t appropriate. It would only do so if a particular meta-ethics were true. Certain forms of internalism about reasons might entail that given this evolutionarily bounded moral psychology and the difficulties with seeing—much less being motivated by such considerations—we can’t actually have moral reasons to change our behavior. This is because for internalist views, in order for something to be a reason for action, on must be able to be motivated by it and recognize it as a reason for action.40 If our moral psychologies interfere with that to a significant degree, then so be it. The world might burn, each of us standing idly by, guiltlessly, blamelessly—none of us responsible for it nor having had sufficient moral reasons to try to prevent it.

Other views—like Strawsonian constructivist views which attempt to construct a notion moral responsibility from the reactive attitudes that we have dispositions to feel in response to actions—might similarly be restricted in what moral claims it can make in virtue of these deeply ingrained psychological tendencies. Likewise, certain conceptions of the nature of the concept of “obligation” like Susan Wolf’s “social command theory” might

40 See, e.g., Bernard Williams, “Internal and External Reasons” reprinted in Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), Stephen Finlay and Mark Schroeder, “Reasons for Action: Internal vs. External,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/reasons-internal-external, Kate Manne, “Internalism about Reasons: Sad But True?” Philosophical Studies 167 (2014): 89-117. Julia Markovits, “Internalism and the Motivating Intuition,” Moral Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 33-81.

23 struggle with a similar problem.41 Wolf argues that even if our evaluative concepts swing independently, “our moral obligations come from the demands or expectations of society”.

This straightforwardly brings with it the risk that if society, in whatever way is most sensible to construe it, doesn’t expect or demand that individuals not play their imperceptibly small role in the hyper production of GHGs and attending climate change, then it cannot be the substance of an obligation.42

But if we have a different meta-ethics, then perhaps we can develop a theory that does not burden the normative project of trying to account for responsibility with respect to climate change within the flailing efforts of historical conceptions of responsibility, or de facto dispositions for reactive attitudes, etc.

I do not mean to be suggesting that because there are alternative meta-ethics that a response to these conceptions will be easy to come by. It is a deep question how far from lived practices our theory of responsibility and obligation can stray and there are profound struggles, and a significant literature, at the boundaries of norms being authoritative while still having a grip on us and being potentially motivating.

Concluding Remarks

Those difficulties notwithstanding, at least it is true, fortunately, that our

“conceptions of responsibility are pragmatic and context-sensitive, and so open to revision”.43 They have shifted in important ways historically in response to shifting normative practices, values, and information and will surely continue to evolve when faced with tensions.

41 Susan Wolf, “Moral Obligations and Social Commands,” in Samuel Newlands & Larry M. Jorgensen (eds.), Metaphysics and the Good: Themes From the Philosophy of Robert Merrihew Adams. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 42 Perhaps Wolf could maintain the social command theory and deny the methodological individualist claim. 43 Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time.

We might make an analogy of what we have seen thus far to a crisis in the sciences.

Something like an anomaly has cropped up within both theoretical and folk-theoretical frameworks. Responding to the above investigation with nothing changed from our pre- theoretical standards and practices strikes me as irresponsibly daft. To bury one’s head in the sand and continue plugging away doing “normal science” when some anomalous observation makes an appearance—without checking one’s instruments and observations, questioning one’s received understanding of the laws, and without being willing (if hesitant) to radically reconceive one’s foundational assumptions if the anomaly is persistent and unaccountable—is to abandon the life-blood of good science. To do the same in moral theory and practice fares no better. Sometimes we are left with more or less radical, paradigm shifting revisions in our scientific theory. The only way to move forward is to adopt the new framework and plod along with its tools and resources. Likewise, in moral theory our received framework can be irreparably fractured. But it is a fracture that opens up space for a new model to operate within; one that can be investigated and prodded itself for a while.

Whatever else I hope to accomplish in this dissertation by way of specific claims defending an adequate account of the morality of climate change, foundational to the whole endeavor is this notion that climate change serves as a crisis. It is an anomaly or fracture that puts pressure on the old paradigm, but directs us anew.44

44 In the end, I hope some of lessons learned here may be exportable to a host of ever more significant features of our moral lives (i.e., other structural injustices, not merely the structural harms of climate change).

Strategies to Resolve the Fundamental Tension and Account for the Morality of Climate Change

Introduction

In the previous chapter I argued that the traditional model of individual responsibility is in significant tension with the prospect of an account of moral responsibility in the context of climate change. I also hope to have intimated the profound urgency for adequately making sense of moral responsibility in this domain. The central task of this chapter is to raise and evaluate five important kinds of strategies to resolve that tension and account for the morality of climate change. I argue that though the last strategy does plausibly assure us that we need not be nihilists about responsibility for climate change, none of these five strategies provide an adequate account of climate morality on its own. But working through them reveals the kinds of gaps that need to be filled and various success conditions for a theory to adequately account for climate morality. These I suggest can be met by the kind of unified theory of distributive justice that I develop in the rest of the dissertation.

I begin with four different strategies to salvage a notion of individual responsibility concerning climate change. The first attempts to show that with an adequate conception of

“harm” we actually can attribute expected harms to individuals in a way that condemns their climate relevant behavior to resolve the tension, despite the initial intuitions otherwise that were on display in the first chapter. I argue that whatever various conception of “harm” that one might consider to do this it ultimately is misguided to base a theory of climate morality on attributing expected harms to individuals.

The second strategy attempts to draw on intuitive Kantian resources for thinking about cases where behavior couldn’t be universalized, or where we treat ourselves as a moral exception, in order to account for individual climate morality and resolve the tension. I argue that the intuitive resources do not get us very far, however they do leave room to draw on insights from Kantian political philosophy and conceptions of distributive justice to account for climate morality.

The third strategy attempts to plumb for a virtue-based account of individual responsibility regarding climate change. I argue that there are not convincing non-question begging accounts for why certain behaviors or lifestyles related to climate change should count as virtuous/vicious. However, I suggest that the distributive justice based view that I develop could provide the right kind of fundamental explanation to redeem “virtue” language regarding climate morality that others want to be able to use but haven’t yet justified.

And the fourth strategy attempts to develop an account of complicity to do the work of grounding individual climate morality. I argue that various existent ways of ways to understand what it is to be complicit are not satisfying in the context of climate change.

Charges of “complicity” only work with an account to ground the intersection between the individual’s behavior and the collective harm. Fortunately, like I suggested can be done for the “virtue” language, the distributive-justice based view that I develop can provide such an account and therefore recover common language about “complicity” and give it content in the climate context.

The fifth strategy represents a significant departure from the first four and suggests that resolving the tension requires a shift in focus to collective responsibility. Without settling the ontology of group agency, I recognize an important insight in this shift, but argue that even

27 if we embrace the idea of collective responsibility, there are still strong reasons to assess whether there are any individual duties which inform or are informed by such collective duties.

Section One: Individual Harm Attribution Strategies

In this section, I investigate the prospect that despite our initial intuitions, I was actually too quick to dismiss the possibility of attributing expected harms to individuals to underwrite their climate duties and account for climate morality. Many scholars are rather comfortable using ‘harm’ language with respect to individual’s contributions to climate change.1 While such usage is often fast and loose, perhaps it can be redeemed with an adequate account of why we can attribute expected harms to individuals. I will assess what I take to be the three most promising kinds of accounts and suggest that basing a theory of climate morality on attributing expected harms to individuals is misguided.

Could Individuals Trigger Threshold Harms?

In the broader literature on moral problems in which seemingly innocuous individual acts combine for aggregative harms, a common strategy for attributing expected harms to individuals is to attend more closely to the role that individuals can play in triggering threshold effects.2 The idea begins by highlighting cases where no bad outcome from any

1 John Broome, for instance, argues that we each have individual duties to zero out our carbon footprint because anything else amounts to “harming” others. Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming World, (New York: W. W. Norton and Co. 2012). Unfortunately, his own view does little more to redeem the claim about harm than simply state it. We may legitimately ask of him, on what conception of harm would this be true? Who would we be harming? Does the account of harm really mean to include any non-zero carbon emissions, even exclusively subsistence emissions? What if we emit carbon but, instead of offsetting to zero out our carbon footprint, we fund adaptation efforts? Does the harm claim still stick? Given everything we have said in Chapter One about the possibility of all of our emissions being inconsequential, one would have to say more to license the use of this term. 2 Shelly Kagan is perhaps the standard bearer here with his “Do I Make a Difference?” Philosophy & Public Affairs 39 (2011): 105-41. But other consequentialists take roughly similar approaches to cases of aggregative harms. See, e.g., Alastair Norcross, “Puppies, Pigs, and People” Philosophical Perspectives 18 (2004): 229-45, at pp. 232-3, Peter Singer in “Utilitarianism and Vegetarianism” Philosophy & Public Affairs 9 (1980): 325-37, Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 73-5, and Allan Gibbard in Utilitarianism and Coordination (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990): pp. 26-7.

28 individual act will occur until a certain threshold is crossed. Shelly Kagan offers a representative example involving harm to animals and butcher orders:

“Presumably it works something like this: there are, perhaps, 25 chickens in a given crate of chickens. So the butcher looks to see when 25 chickens have been sold, so as to order 25 more…Here then it makes no difference…whether 7, 13, or 23 chickens have been sold. But when 25 have been sold this triggers the call to the chicken farm, and 25 more chickens are killed, and another 25 [chickens] are hatched and raised and tortured.”3

The thought is that, in such cases, while most individual acts won’t make a difference to any harm being realized, there is a small chance that an act will make “a big (morally relevant) difference” by being the act that pushes past the threshold and “triggers” the aggregative harm.4 The combination of an admittedly low probability of being the 25th order with the large magnitude of triggering the torture and death of 25 chickens, is taken to generate a negative expected utility calculation for all prospective chicken purchasers.5

We saw in the first chapter that no individual behavior is sufficient for causing the effects of climate change, but might the argumentative resources embedded in these threshold triggering cases apply in the context of climate change to allow us to attribute expected harms to individuals and resolve our tension? I do not think so.

There are two central reasons we should be skeptical of this move alone resolving our fundamental tension. The first borrows from work Mark Budolfson has done in response to Kagan and company. Budolfson argues that in many cases involving clear and identifiable triggering mechanisms, the combination of a low probability of triggering a large magnitude harm does not actually generate a negative expected utility calculation for all (or even most) individuals. This is because we often know enough about the mechanisms

3 Kagan, “Do I Make a Difference?” p. 122. 4 Kagan, “Do I Make a Difference?” p. 120. 5 Moreover it does so while preserving the Difference Criterion from Chapter One.

29 involved to make it illegitimate to assign a simple 1/n probability of triggering the problematic effects.6 When paired with individual expected benefit of contributing to the problem (e.g., eating a delicious chicken or enjoying the goods of high emissions), this kind of prospect is likely a recipe for moral disaster that re-entrenches, rather than resolves the collective action problem.

However, a more fundamental reason to be skeptical of this method for attributing expected harms to individuals is that while there may be some so-called “threshold” effects with respect to climate change, it is not plausible given the bio-physical mechanics of climate change that the harms associated with it are such as to be “triggered” by individual actions. It isn’t like the prospective chicken purchaser who might be the 25th orderer, thereby triggering a new crate shipment and a new 25 chickens slaughtered.7 There’s no flip of the light switch or joy ride or lifetime of emissions that, on the heels of being at some precipice by the similar behavior of others, serves as a trigger for a degree or two of warming, some inch(es) of sea-level rise, or any floods, droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, etc.

6 See Mark Budolfson persuasively argue this point in his, “The Inefficacy Objection to Consequentialism, and the Problem with the [Singer/Norcross/Kagan] Expected Consequences Response,” Philosophical Studies (forthcoming). He thinks there is an invalid argument at the heart of the Kagan (Singer/Norcross) position. Quoting Budolfson, it can be put this way:  Premise 1: You know that if some number n of additional people were to perform action A, effects E would ensue.  Premise 2: You don’t know exactly how many additional people will perform A.  Conclusion: Therefore, the expected marginal E-effect of you A-ing is (1/n)*E, if you know that there are no other thresholds for E-effects. The problem Budolfson points to is that “this argument is invalid and instances of its conclusion are typically false because we may and usually do have additional knowledge about the mechanisms at play within a collective action situation that rationally requires us to assign a very different probability to triggering a threshold effect than the simple idea that the probability is 1/n. As a result, if arguments such as the one above are to be made plausible, occurrences of ‘1/n’ must be replaced with ‘the probability of triggering the relevant threshold effect’. However, once that substitution is made, the result does not support anything like the conclusion that the expected marginal effect on animal welfare of one individual becoming a vegetarian is substantially positive on balance. Instead, it supports the initial thought that the expected effect is closer to zero than to the average effect, because given what is known about inefficiency, other forms of ‘slack’ in the supply chain, and the insensitivity of production decisions to the signal generated by a single consumer, it would be unreasonable to assign a probability to triggering a threshold effect that is sufficiently high to vindicate the Singer/Norcross/Kagan response.” 7 Assuming Kagan is right that this is even how it works in the butcher case, which he might not be.

Attending to the ways in which individuals can sometimes trigger threshold harm doesn’t, then, seem to provide an adequate account of how we could attribute climate harms to individuals in order to undergird a theory of climate morality and resolve our tension.

Could Individuals Cause “Imperceptible” Harms?

Perhaps, however, we do not need to rely on the threshold triggering mechanism to attribute climate harms to individuals. Another strategy for attributing climate harms to individuals is to embrace the notion that individuals can cause “imperceptible” harms, even if they cannot alone cause or, on the heels of others’ similar behavior, trigger climate effects.

The concept of an imperceptible harm is perhaps best approached by example, and the standard bearer is Derek Parfit’s distributed torturers case. In this case 1,000 people can each turn a dial that increases the voltage flowing to some innocent victim.8 No single dial is significant enough to cause any pain or any noticeable increase in pain from the state prior to turning it. But, in classic sorites fashion, if all 1,000 dials are turned, the victim faces excruciating pain. In this case an individual turn of the dial increases the voltage slightly but is imperceptible to the victim with respect to what seems to be the morally relevant category, pain.9

Imperceptible harms are meant to capture what is going on in this case by referring to actions that contribute to an underlying dimension (e.g., voltage) that in aggregate produces perceptible harm(s), but which do not, as contributions, produce any change in

8 Parfit, Reasons and Persons, p. 80. 9 I recognize that in ordinary course torture could do painless damage to internal organs, but we can imagine the torture device is sophisticated enough to avoid that and target only pain sensations without concurrent damage to the body. I also don’t want to discount the potential violations of autonomy that could be involved in such a scenario (I think we could construct the case to minimize this), however this is clearly not the category of moral wrongdoing that proponents of imperceptible harms are trying to capture. From their own perspectives they are thinking of harms as bound up in and dependent on pains.

31 what is perceptible.10 Importantly, imperceptible harms are invoked to explain why a given individual should not turn the dial. If harms do not need to be perceptible to be morally significant, then a turn of the dial could harm the victim even if they do not perceive an increase in pain.

Perhaps we can deploy imperceptible harms, similarly, to provide an explanation for why individuals should restrict their GHGs. That is, perhaps they can be used to attribute climate harms to individuals and solve the tension, After all, it seems we could replace

“voltage” with “GHGs” and adjust the problematic outcome to reference aggregated climate harms (rather than aggregated torture), thus neatly fitting the paradigm structure for imperceptible harms.

Unfortunately, I worry that attempting to invoke “imperceptible harms” to explain why a prospective torturer shouldn’t turn the dial or why an individual shouldn’t emit GHGs is unmotivated.11 In both cases, it seems to do little more than take what we knew (that individuals can change the underlying dimension without perceptibly changing an aggregated outcome), apply a label of “harm” to it and assume that generates a reason to not perform the act. But precisely what was in question was whether changing the underlying dimension

10 For important treatments of this terrain see Julia Nefsky “Consequentialism and the Problem of Collective Harm: A Reply to Kagan” Philosophy and Public Affairs 39(4) (2012): 364-395, esp. p. 366, and Kagan, “Do I Make a Difference?” p. 117. Nefsky ultimately argues convincingly that there is a more fundamental phenomenon at play that extends beyond purely qualia-based perceptibility. While we are talking about voltage and pain here as the underlying dimension and moral value of interest, the same structure will occur in cases there the underlying dimensions is water supply and the moral value is justice, see pp. 375-8. 11 Kagan himself is hesitant to follow down this road and is skeptical that positing imperceptible harms is a promising line, see “Do I Make a Difference?” pp. 114-7. Ultimately, he tries to solve the torturers case by arguing that it (and he wants to claim) all other “imperceptible harm” cases are actually threshold triggering cases in disguise and can be handled with an analysis just like the butcher order case. That is, he wants to deny the existence of imperceptible harm cases and instead claim that all aggregative harm cases involve a triggering mechanism that guarantees the consequentialist has a way of condemning individual contributions to aggregate harm cases. With this he thinks he can secure the claim that individuals do have decisive reasons not to turn the dial. This overall strategy, however, is not satisfying in general, nor is it helpful toward resolving our climate case for it just re-invites the problems sketched in the above section regarding the implausibility of threshold mechanisms in climate change.

32 could be problematic because it didn’t produce a perceptible change. Aside from attempting to guarantee a solution in these kinds of cases, I see little independent case to be made for accepting the existence of imperceptible harms.12 We already have moral terms and concepts tailored to thinking about wrongs that do not cause harm, often more associated with matters of justice and rights, such that skewing our harm-language to break its tight intuitive connection to perceptibility seems unnecessary.

What’s worse is that merely acknowledging the existence of imperceptible harms in cases like the distributed torturers and climate change, doesn’t actually guarantee a solution that avoids the collective harm without more work. Imagine a slight alteration to the torture case. This time, each of the prospective dial turners gets a cupcake out of the deal (and they love cupcakes). They each then individually get a perceptible benefit and individually only cause a tiny imperceptible harm. However, when we run that through for each prospective dial turner, we get a tradeoff of torture for 1,000 semi-sated dial turners in sugar comas. This result seems morally misguided and should make us pause in thinking that embracing the existence of “imperceptible” harms will solve our climate tension. Like the cupcake for the torturers, real and perceptible benefits accrue to individual emitters from miniscule increases in the historical stock of GHG emissions that by hypothesis are imperceptible with respect to anyone’s experienced harm. It seems one should be able to compare a perceptible benefit against an imperceptible harm. But it looks like the perceptible benefit come out would on top. For a view that is attempting to attribute harms (of an imperceptible kind) to individuals in order to solve the tension and provide an account of the morality of climate change, this is problematic.

12 While of course this is not decisive, but for instance, if one has a mental state theory of wellbeing, like hedonism, one will have a hard time accepting the imperceptible harm approach.

Of course one might suggest that imperceptible harms cannot be neatly comparable to perceptible harms and may outweigh them. Perhaps the imperceptible harm is in fact more morally serious than the perceptible benefit. But without having some explanation as to why, this seems problematically ad hoc; a device, otherwise unmotivated, employed merely to guarantee the intuitive conclusion.

All of this is to say that acknowledging “imperceptible” harms doesn’t clearly generate decisive and practically guiding reasons to restrict GHG emissions so as to have the potential to actually resolve the tension.

Could Individuals Cause “Statistical” Harms?

Another way to attempt to attribute climate harms to individuals is to make use of a notion of “statistical harms”. Instead of trying to trace out some triggering mechanism, or embracing “imperceptible” harms, perhaps we should simply distribute individual shares of responsibility for expected global harm in proportion to individual shares of global emissions.13 This breaks the need to trace a causal connection between an individual action and its particular effects through the various processes involved in the aggregation of emissions that causes problems.14 Instead, the idea is to simply translate aggregate expected

13 John Nolt adopts this strategy in his paper “How Harmful are the Average American’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions?” Ethics, Policy & Environment, 14 (2011): 3-10. 14 Kagan himself considered and rejected a similar kind of approach precisely because it amounts to abandoning the search for finding the actual difference individual actions or sets of actions make. This concern can be made clearer by introducing some language that Mark Budolfson employs when talking about a similar problem; what he calls the “average effects fallacy”. The central worry is that there are good reasons to believe that our actual effects don’t neatly correspond to the average effects. Kagan and Budolfson are going to see this as a reason to think that when we are making decisions, ostensibly on the basis of harmful consequences, we should be concerned not with the average harmful effects of some general type of action, but the actual harmful effects of our own action. This, too, they will think is how attributions of responsibility should be made. To do otherwise seems unfair. It flattens out distinctions that matter. This is to say, it cannot be quite so simple to pin responsibility of statistical harms or deaths on individual emitters in proportion to their emissions because the actual effects of the emissions might not equal the average effects. See Kagan, “Do I Make a Difference?” pp. 113-4 and Mark Budolfson, “Consumer Ethics, Harm Footprints, and the Empirical Dimensions of Food Choices,” in Andrew Chignell, Terence Cuneo, and Matthew Halteman (eds.) Philosophy Comes to Dinner, (New York: Routledge, 2015). I have to say, it is a bit strange to see Kagan employ this particular argument against this “statistical” approach because his own expected utility model in triggering cases already breaks from the ideal of figuring out the actual difference an act makes. For instance, Kagan says

34 emissions into expected global harms, and then disaggregate back individual responsibility for a portion of that expected harm.15

This kind of strategy to attribute climate harms to individuals is the most promising of the three leading candidates I’ve surveyed. It doesn’t make implausible claims about threshold triggering, and because it has an explicit account proportionally connecting individual emissions to aggregate harms it isn’t victim to the worry facing the imperceptible harm theorist of comparing perceptible benefits to imperceptible harms. However, I argue that it is ultimately at a disadvantage against distributive-justice based views (like the one I will ultimately develop) that don’t require translating individual resource use into claims about individual “statistical harms”.

On the statistical harms approach, one’s emissions are tantamount to harming statistical, unidentifiable people (on Nolt’s version the average American’s emissions are tantamount to killing two statistical people). Such statistical harms are a serious affair and are meant to be the notion that justifies one’s obligation to reduce emissions. However, whether

“Admittedly, in such cases, I may not be able to know whether or not, if I act, I will be part of a cohort of the relevant size for triggering the bad results. But no matter. I can still know that the expected utility of my act is negative. And that will be enough to allow the consequentialist to condemn my act” (p. 129). Kagan is also worried that this kind of strategy won’t actually work to condemn individual behavior in every aggregate harm case the consequentialist might want, but I will ignore this for now. 15 John Nolt is one scholar who explicitly employs this statistical harm strategy, and, running through his calculations, Nolt concludes that the average American is responsible for the deaths of two future people. It is worth mentioning, though I won’t pursue the thought, that Nolt’s account depends on the coherence of talking about harming and/or killing as yet non-existent future persons. This simply assumes one can bypass the nonidentity problem where the existence of future persons depends upon contemporary action and those future persons have lives worth living. Many scholars have attempted to resolve the non-identity problem by appealing to impersonal harms rather than personal, counterfactual harms to explain why one could do wrong by bringing future persons into existence below a certain threshold of wellbeing, even if they have lives worth living and couldn’t themselves have existed above such a threshold. Nolt must go further, however. Although he does not acknowledge this, his view requires the recognition of not only ‘impersonal harm’, but ‘impersonal statistical harm’. See, e.g., Elizabeth Harman, “Can We Harm and Benefit in Creating?” Philosophical Perspectives, 18 (2004): 89-113, Seana Shiffrin, “Wrongful Life, Procreative Responsibility, and the Significance of Harm,” Legal Theory, 5 (1999): 117–48, Jeff McMahan, “Asymmetries in the Morality of Causing People to Exist,” in Harming Future Persons: Ethics, Genetics and the Nonidentity Problem, edited by M. Roberts and D. Wasserman (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009) pp. 49–68. Lukas Meyer, “Past and Future: The Case for a Threshold Notion of Harm,” in Rights, Culture, and the Law: Themes from the Legal and Political Philosophy of Joseph Raz, edited by Lukas Meyer, Stanley Paulson and Thomas Pogge, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). pp. 143-160.

35 one actually harms any statistical people depends intimately on the realization of future harms that only exist through masses of emissions activity by others. That is, to claim that my emissions, for instance, kill two statistical people assumes that other people’s behavior remains unchanged. This result is problematic.16

We can see why by exploring some possibilities. If many people or governments change their behavior, invest in renewable energy sources, add carbon sinks, etc. before we exceed our global carbon budget, then the collective harms won’t materialize for me to have a proportional individual share of. In that case it certainly can’t be true that I did something tantamount to killing two statistical people, but that was meant to be the justification for my duty to reduce my emissions. Does this indicate that I didn’t actually have an obligation to reduce my emissions and did no wrong by opting not to? I do not think the mere fact that everyone else stepped up and saved the day, is sufficient to absolve one’s responsibility. This is hard to explain if we take shares of statistical harm to be the basic justification for individual duties.

Perhaps the statistical harm theorist will agree and want to shift to a concern that doesn’t depend on actual outcomes, which rely on others. Perhaps the real problem was one of recklessness; we risked harming statistical people and were merely morally lucky that we didn’t because others significantly reshaped the world. The problem is that we can construct the case such that even the charge of risking statistical harm seems implausible, but that still doesn’t seem sufficient to absolve responsibility.17 Imagine that it is a fact that others will

16 Recalling the first chapter, one might notice that this abandons one of the initial commitments of the orthodox conception of moral responsibility that we started with, the Independence Criterion (i.e., S is not responsible for the harm R brings about unless S has induced or coerced R into action.). Perhaps we have to do so in the end, but abandoning it would have to be well-motivated and done in the right way. 17 The “risking statistical harms” model seems normatively unstable—the more likely it is that others will step in, the less plausible it is to say anyone risks statistical harm and therefore the less likely it is generate moral obligations for anyone.

36 step in, and I have all the evidence pointing in that direction. It seems like neither objectively nor subjectively did I plausibly risk statistical harm. I still think that I can have done wrong.

However the reasons for the intuition that I can still have done wrong require a whole new moral vocabulary to risk and statistical harms. The reasons pertain to concepts like fairness, doing one’s fair share, or avoiding free-riding. Even if I know that others will prevent the global harm from being realized (which would have, if realized, disaggregated back to me proportional to my contribution), it seems I can do wrong; not by risking statistical harm, but by taking advantage and free-riding on their efforts without doing my fair share.

The statistical harms approach can do a lot, but it cannot accommodate this intuition. In virtue of that I think is at a serious disadvantage to the kind of justice-based view which I go on to develop in the rest of this dissertation as a way of resolving the tension and providing an account of climate morality.18

Section Two: Simple Kantian Strategies

Instead of trying to attribute harms to individuals, others more fond of Kantian resources might try to employ them in order to provide an account of individual duties to resolve the tension and provide an account of climate morality. After all, Kant’s ethical legacy in part revolves around his thinking regarding cases in which behavior can’t be universalized or where we treat ourselves as a moral exception, which seems relevant to the

18 I have no problem if someone were to take the justice-based account I develop and define climate “harms” in terms of its deliverances. I only mind if people put the cart before the horse. Derivatively defining harms gets expression in some of Joel Feinberg’s work where he speaks of determining harms (and wrongs) against the backdrop of a regulative system applying rules for allocating [emission] permits in accordance with specified requirements of fairness and efficiency. The harm language is stipulated on the heels of the real moral work which happens at the level of the fair regulative system by which to define individual harms in terms of (Feinberg focuses on existing systems, but we could clearly extend the scope to ideal, non-actual regulative schemes). See Joel Feinberg, “Environmental Pollution & the Threshold of Harm” The Hastings Center Report 14.3 (1984), 27-31.

37 problem of climate change. In this section I take a brief look at some simple and common (if perhaps caricatured) Kantian resources one might attempt to deploy. Perhaps most naturally the Kantian concern of universalizability, which may be helpful for accounting for climate morality shows up in Kant’s first formulation of the Categorical Imperative, the Universal

Law Formulation (FUL): “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.”19 Might we be able to make use of FUL to generate individual climate duties?

One elementary thing to remember about FUL is that it doesn’t condemn individual actions that would be bad (for ourselves or others) if everyone acted similarly. Instead, it condemns actions insofar as they are based on certain maxims for which he thinks it is impossible to will that they become universal law.20 For Kant, maxims are conceived as subjective principles of volition, or a kind of normative rule or policy that one acts on.21 They are things like “I will betray others to enrich myself”, or “I will help those in need.” Kant thought that some maxims generated a certain kind of contradiction when universalized and that this would inform us of our moral duties.22 FUL proposes a sort of test for the permissibility of maxims in order to generate action-guiding content on Kant’s theory. In the

Groundwork, Kant tries to apply this test to examples of four different kinds of maxims regarding suicide, making false promises, wasting away one’s talents, and refusing to help

19 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (GW), ed., M. Gregor, trans., M. Gregor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). GW 4:421. Kant, of course, uses another preliminary formulation, the Formula of the Law of Nature (FLN): “act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature”, there is significant literature on these details but the point I am making should run with either FUL or FLN. 20 Or “universal laws of nature” for FLN. 21 GW 4:400, see also Allen Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 78. 22 This is distinct from the idea that a maxim contains itself a contradiction, like “I will X and not-X”. Kant thought that maxims could generate contradictions in two different ways which he used to distinguish between violations of “perfect’ and “imperfect” duties. Onora O’Neill has called, and others follow her, these two ways “contradiction in conception” (CC) and “contradiction in the will” (CW), Acting on Principle: An Essay on Kantian Ethics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

38 others in need.23 For example, consider making false promises. Kant thinks that acting on a maxim such as “when in need I will borrow money and promise to pay it back, while knowing that I never will” fails the universalization test.24 If we imagine it a universal law that everyone acted on that maxim, he thinks the very meaning of a promise breaks down. It would take us too far afield to litigate the arguments Kant gives for thinking that each of the examples of maxims he gives fail the universalization test, each has been subject to vigorous debate elsewhere and face significant objections.25 But I think this sketch-work is enough to see why we should be skeptical that FUL can provide much assistance in resolving the tension or accounting for climate morality.

First, the maxims that it is most reasonable to construe people as acting on in the course of their individual behavior that contributes to climate change do not actually seem impossible to will that everyone act upon them, as Kant needs to violate this formulation of the categorical imperative. The maxims people seem to act on are things like, “when it is hot,

I’ll use my AC”, “to enjoy time with my family, I’ll fly home for the holidays”, etc. There is nothing conceptually incoherent or self-contradictory about those maxims being universalized. They can’t plausibly generate a contradiction of the sort that purportedly plagued the false promise by breaking down the very institution of promising, which on was trying to engage in by making the false promise. There are of course bad consequences when everyone acts on them, but bad consequences aren’t the kind of reasons Kant can appeal to with FUL.26

23 In trying to argue that these maxims fail one of the two universalization tests (CC or CW), he aims to show that duties of all four types from his general taxonomy can be generated through FUL (i.e., perfect and imperfect duties owed to oneself and to others). 24 Specifically the “contradiction in conception” test. 25 For a comprehensive examination see Ch. 3 of Allen Wood’s Kant’s Ethical Thought. 26 Kant’s explanation of the duty of beneficence of course did not require that a maxim of non-beneficence generate any kind of contradiction in conception, instead it failed the CW test. While not incoherent, he thought it was nevertheless irrational to will non-beneficence given our vulnerabilities as a human being, and

Second, and more importantly however, there are also widely accepted problems for using FUL as a test to generate an account of individual duties more generally. There are good arguments that FUL is both over-inclusive and under-inclusive in what it condemns and therefore a determination one way or another regarding whether a maxim passes or fails the test cannot secure the conclusion that it is morally permissible or prohibited.27 Kant’s universalization test in FUL seems to have false positives, meaning that there are maxims which pass the test but which should clearly be ruled out as impermissible. If we sufficiently specify the maxim, for instance, Kant’s test struggles. A maxim such as, “in order to advantage myself, I will make a false promise on Dec. 1st to Jake Tapper” doesn’t seem impossible to universalize. It wouldn’t undermine, or make impossible, the practice of promising, as Kant tried to make out in the original false promise case.28 As Allen Wood puts it, “the greater the specificity of an agent’s intentions, as formulated in a maxim, the less sweeping will be the effect if the maxim becomes a universal law of nature, and hence the more likely it will be that even grossly immoral conduct will pass the [universalization] tests.”29

Furthermore, Kant’s universalization test also seems to have false negatives, meaning that there are maxims which fail the test but which are seem quite clearly innocent and morally permissible. A maxim to leave work early to beat the traffic, or to buy a certain kind of artifact but never sell one, or play tennis on a weekday to avoid the crowds, all would

the ways in which we depend on others to preserve and further my own rational agency. While I cannot present the full argument here, I am skeptical of Kant’s derivation of the duty of beneficence, and further the point below about false positives and negatives applies equally to the CC and CW universalization tests, so even if non-beneficence fails the CW test, it is not clear that this tells us anything definitive about Kant’s general imperfect duty of beneficence, and it tells us potentially even less about any discrete climate maxims that may fail the CW test, which suggests that we need to keep looking. Thanks to Karen Stohr for help clarifying this point. 27 See, e.g., Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought, esp. pp. 81-2, 97-107. 28 Wood discusses these kinds of cases and rebuts some responses to this kind of false positive objection to FUL, see Kant’s Ethical Thought, p. 102-105. 29 Ibid., p. 103.

40 violate the universalization test. They are self-defeating or incoherent when universalized, but it is implausible to think that should suggest that they are morally impermissible.30

This isn’t to argue against Kant or Kantian ethics. Instead it is to show that FUL itself, which is sometimes put forward as a mechanism for condemning actions that, under some description, cannot be universalized, cannot do the work in application to climate change, or generally as a morally defensible test for the permissibility or impermissibility of actions.31

Most contemporary Kantians, it is no surprise, put much more stock in the

Humanity Formulation (FH) of the Categorical Imperative to generate individual duties than they do FUL. The Humanity Formulation is where Kant prohibits using a person as a “mere means”. As he puts it, “So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.”32 Might we use the FH to generate individual climate duties?

There are complicated debates about how to interpret FH and its arguments, which I obviously won’t be able to settle here. The broad lessons contained in FH, though, are that

Kant thinks persons have a kind of common status in virtue of their rational agency and autonomous capacities to set ends, which entitles them to certain moral consideration. As this gets interpreted by scholars trying to understand FH beyond a mere formal, abstract, and indeterminate statement of status, the core of FH is often understood to be a prescription against actions that do not adequately respect others’ autonomy or that they

30 Ibid., 105-107 for further discussion of this. 31 Which isn’t to say it cannot play another function. Allen Wood, for instance, thinks that it serves as a preliminary step on the way to formulating a proper moral theory, one whose core point is that we cannot make a privileged exception for ourselves to universal moral laws that everyone else is expected to follow. 32 Kant, GW 4:429.

41 couldn’t rationally consent to.33 To go back to the example of making a false promise, the thought is that by promising to pay back the money one borrows with no intention of doing so we undermine the lender’s ability to make a truly autonomous decision about what to do with one’s money. Perhaps they would choose to give you the money anyway, but being deprived of the information to make a properly informed decision they cannot be said to have autonomously and consensually agreed to not getting their money back by the terms of the agreement.

Other climate ethicists that have entertained this kind of Kantian angle in order to account for climate morality, such as Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, have argued that individual climate behaviors are unlikely to violate FH. He doesn’t think that doing things like using electricity, driving to work, flying, etc. can neatly be described as treating others as mere means. His main reason for thinking this is that unlike the lying promise which requires that the lender be manipulated into giving you the money to accomplish your end, the effects on others are both not a part of, nor are they necessary for, our individual climate-relevant motives and behaviors.34 Moreover, as we discussed at length above, how others fare from climate change is not controllable one way or another by us, whereas in the paradigmatic FH cases, like the false promise, how the lender, who is being used, fares is controllable by the liar.

There is something to this point by Sinnott-Armstrong, but I do not think it is sufficient to undermine the possibility of drawing on Kantian resources that people take from the Humanity Formulation. There is, I believe, potential to giving an account of how

33 See, e.g., Christine Korsgaard, “The Right to Lie: Kant on Dealing with Evil,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 15 (4) (1986): 325-349 or Japa Pallikkathayil, “Deriving Morality from Politics: Rethinking the Formula of Humanity,” Ethics 121 (1) (2010): 116-147. 34 Sinnott-Armstrong, “It’s Not My Fault”, p. 303.

42 individual climate behavior could potentially fall broadly under the headings of not adequately respecting others’ autonomy and not being something that others can rationally consent to. Giving such an account, however, takes significant effort.

So my overall point in this section not to undermine the possibility of a Kantian influenced account of climate morality. Although it does not strictly depend on them, the view I develop will indeed draw on Kantian resources. But I maintain that only by going on a detailed route through Kant’s political philosophy and theory of distributive justice regarding the norms of using unowned resources will we be able to plausibly make use of

Kantian insights with regard to climate morality and ultimately make sense of things people might want to say about individual climate behavior using FH about autonomy or rational consent. Moreover, even if one is skeptical about Kant, because my ultimate account is a disjunctive account that draws on other sources, it can still be appealing.

Section Three: Virtue-Based Strategies

In this section I consider the strategy of turning towards virtue theory to give an individualist account of climate morality, an allure a number of climate ethicists have felt.35

Perhaps the “orthodox” picture of moral responsibility that I pitched in Chapter One that generates the tension was tilted from the beginning away from virtue-theoretic models of

35 See Ronald Sandler’s “Ethical Theory and the Problem of Inconsequentialism: Why Environmental Ethicists Should be Virtue-Oriented Ethicists,” J Agric Environ Ethics 23 (2010): 167-183, Dale Jamieson’s “When Utilitarians Should be Virtue Theorists” Utilitas 19.2 (2007): 160-183, and Marion Hourdequin, “Climate, Collective Action and Individual Ethical Obligations,” Environmental Values 19 (2010): 443-464. Sandler suggests a number of reasons why he thinks that virtue theory is “well resourced” for addressing climate morality: 1) Discrete actions are not evaluated entirely on the basis of the outcomes (or likely outcomes) of the action. 2) It evaluates on the basis of patterns of behavior or activities throughout a person’s life, as well as patterns among people or communities. 3) Its evaluative focal points (i.e., what it directly evaluates) include attitudes or perspectives of people. 4) The evaluation of attitudes and perspectives bear on evaluation of actions. 5) The evaluation of an agent’s actions is not overly contingent on the actions of others. 6) The evaluation of actions is sensitive to the significance of consequences, even when those consequences are unintended byproducts of actions. (p. 169)

43 responsibility.36 Correcting that tilt by embracing lessons from virtue theorists might be the trick to resolve our fundamental tension.

The central idea behind the strategy of developing a virtue-based account of climate morality is that certain ways of contributing to climate change are not virtuous, even if they are not harmful or condemnable through simple Kantian lights entertained above. That much I actually do not want to disagree with. In the end, I think it is plausible that the language of virtue and vice can serve to describe climate morality for individuals, but I think it will do so as a summary notion or heuristic, with the brunt of the moral philosophical work situated elsewhere.

For any virtue theory to resolve the fundamental tension, it has to be the case that the very kinds of behaviors that produce climate change would be condemned as vicious by the virtue theory. It is not enough to simply declare, for instance, radically reduced carbon emissions virtuous and high carbon emissions vicious and call it a day. As Walter Sinnott-

Armstrong puts it, we need more than an “I know vice when I see it” approach to determining what constitutes climate virtues and vices. Where some people see an expression of vice in high emissive behavior, others see a commitment to fun, or adventurousness, or filiality.37 We need some non-question-begging explanation for when and why behaviors or lifestyles related to climate change express particular virtues or vices. I do not think the existing climate virtue literature has convincingly lived up to the challenge of giving such an explanation.

36 Even if it was indeed a faithful descriptive rendering of our functioning, if implicit, conceptions of responsibility. 37 Sinnott-Armstrong, “It’s Not My Fault”, p. 303-4. Unfortunately for the virtue theorist many of the usual suspects that explain why behavior is virtuous or vicious are off the table in the climate context.

Climate virtue theorist Ronald Sandler, for instance, suggests that a general list of virtues and vices (in terms of which actions are evaluated) should be populated by looking at character traits either consequentially or teleologically and that this will include “green” virtues.38

The process of justifying a specific character trait as a virtue or vice consequentially runs into familiar troubles, however, when viewed in light of climate change. On the one hand, if justifying a trait like “high emissive behavior” as a vice consequentially requires that an individual instance (or a whole lifetime) of acting in a high-emissive way does harm, then we already have strong reasons from Section One of this chapter to be skeptical of the explanation of the vice.39 On the other hand, if justifying that trait as a vice is to say that when many people have high-emissive traits harms arise, we also have problems. Certainly not everything that would cause harm if many people did it is a vice, so that fact alone couldn’t explain why something is a vice.40 Moreover, this simply doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know, it essentially just stipulates that we call those things vices, which looks question begging. This is a similar problem to what faced the imperceptible harms theorist above, but rather than calling such behaviors “imperceptibly harmful”, the virtue theorist declares them vicious. Doing so overlooks exactly the point of concern that is at issue, which is whether or not, and why, we can condemn individuals for acting in certain ways that look to be only problematic when lots of others also do them. So it isn’t enough to claim that we

38 Sandler, “Ethical Theory and the Problem of Inconsequentialism,” p. 169. Sandler says, in a general way, that a “character trait is a virtue to the extent that its possession is generally conducive to promoting the good; and a character trait is a vice to the extent that it is generally detrimental to promoting the good,” (p. 176). This is a similar conception to the one Julia Driver presents when she views virtues as those character traits that “systematically produces or gives rise to the good”. See Uneasy Virtue. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 108. Dale Jamieson closely follows Driver in, “When Utilitarians Should be Virtue Theorists”. 39 The same is true, mutadis mutandis for trying to justify a trait like “low emissive behavior” as a virtue for the good consequences it promotes. 40 As the most innocuous example, if everyone drank orange juice for breakfast we’d run into agricultural problems, transportation problems, migrant worker problems, etc. but of course that doesn’t mean drinking orange juice is a vice.

45 can condemn such behaviors because they count as vicious, when the argument for why they count as vicious is precisely because they are problematic when others join.41

Similarly, however, trying to give a teleological justification for high-emissive behavior counting as a vice and low emissive behavior counting as a virtue also seems problematic.

Teleological justifications for counting certain traits as virtuous or vicious have to make reference to claims about human nature and flourishing. On this kind of picture, virtues are those traits that align or harmonize with human nature and facilitate or constitute flourishing whereas vices are those traits which are at odds with or degrade human nature and reduce or undermine flourishing (aside from deprivation in flourishing that results from many people doing the same thing, which can’t provide the explanation without running into the same theoretical problem as for the attempted “consequentialist” justification for the virtue). One could try to fill in the story with different accounts of human nature and flourishing. Sandler has in mind a roughly neo-Aristotelian teleological view to try to capture climate virtues and vices. Marion Hourdequin’s pursues a functionally similar neo-Confucian teleological view to try to do the same.42 And we could imagine yet other accounts.

41 Dale Jamieson also leans heavily on a kind of virtue-theoretic account that is justified consequentially, but his contribution doesn’t provide further resources to help. Rather than attempting to better justify why certain traits are virtues, or show why any individual behaviors or lifestyles can be condemned in such terms, Jamieson is more focused on developing an account of a moral psychology, motivational structure, and decision procedure that he thinks would be superior to the moral psychology of a consequentialist trying, at every instance, to calculate and make decisions contingent on the behavior of others, which leads us to the “downward spiral of non-cooperation.” He might be right that the decision strategy of adopting “radical green virtues” and shutting off one’s action-by-action calculating brain would do better, and certainly if everyone adopted this moral psychology we would avoid the worst of climate change, but marking it does not arrive at a virtue-theoretic account of climate morality. There are manifold other moral psychologies, motivational structures, and decision procedures that would be similarly situated. See Jamieson, “When Utilitarians Should Be Virtue Theorists”. 42 See Marion Hourdequin, “Climate, Collective Action and Individual Ethical Obligations.” The Confucian conception of human nature and flourishing, for instance, is deeply tied to community, family, and socio- cultural tradition. See, e.g., Bryan Van Norden “Virtue Ethics and Confucianism,” in Bo Mou, ed., Comparative Approaches to Chinese Philosophy (London: Ashgate Publishing, 2003), pp. 99-121. Hourdequin’s thought is that recognizing the social nature of the individual as an agent will forestall the impulse to free-ride or reject some set of duties simply because others are not acting similarly, as well as undermine the idea that either of those impulses might be justified in virtue of our theory of moral responsibility (like it may be justified for the expected utility theorist). But even if that is true of certain social structures (i.e., maybe seeing myself as socially

I am skeptical that there will be anything intrinsic to any plausible conception of human nature or human flourishing such that high-emissive behavior degrades our nature or reduces our flourishing as agents (again, bracketing the aggregative effects which aren’t meant to be the driving force of this way of determining the range of virtues an vices). On the contrary, high emissions often seem rather conducive to an individual’s flourishing.

Ultimately, I do not think these prominent virtue-theoretic conceptions have provided a complete or fundamental enough explanation of climate virtues and vices for a satisfying account of the individual morality of climate change. Of course I have not surveyed every kind of explanation one could give for why certain traits and behaviors should count as virtuous or vicious.43 Moreover, I do not want to deny that it is possible to plausibly fill out a theoretical story to warrant describing certain forms of climate behavior as virtuous and others as vicious. In fact, I want to suggest that the distributive justice based view that I proceed to develop in the rest of the dissertation will provide the right kind of fundamental explanation to redeem a derivative “virtue” language regarding climate morality that others want to be able to use but haven’t yet justified. All of the interesting moral work, though, will occur at that level of explanation, which suggests to me that the idea of a virtue- theoretic explanation of climate morality coming to save the day is misguided.

intermeshed with my family will alter the way I think about what it is to do my chores), I find it quite implausible that this would scale up to social structures that are truly global. In fact the Confucian emphasis on family, community, and embodying the cultural tradition has built in to it, intrinsically, a certain parochial focus. But of course a very similar kind of parochialism is exactly what sets up the problem of collective action at the global scale for addressing climate change. 43 I mentioned in Section Two of this chapter that I will ultimately draw on, though not exclusively, Kantian political philosophy and theories of distributive justice to build an account of climate morality. So if one had in mind the kinds of accounts of virtues and vices we could trace to the classical political philosophers like Kant, Hobbes, or Locke, bear with me as I deal with these views later in the dissertation. I think it is justified to treat them separately because that kind of virtue language is so derivative on the difficult political philosophical heavy-lifting which, as you will see, takes so much work to develop on its own in the context of climate change.

Section Four: Complicity-Based Strategies

In this section I consider the prospect of developing an account of “complicity” as one last general strategy to salvage a notion of individual responsibility to resolve the fundamental tension and ground an account of climate morality. Indeed it is quite common and natural to hear individuals be condemned as “complicit” in large collective problems like racism, sexism, or climate destruction.

The concept of complicity, at its core, is a concept about the relation between an agent and the wrongdoing of others. For reasons we will see shortly, I intend this general description to be deliberately open-ended to include an individual’s relation to another individual agent’s discrete moral wrong, or an individual’s relation to a collective agent’s moral wrong, or an individual’s relation to some non-agential structural process that produces harm or injustice. Some ways of relating to others’ wrongdoing (broadly construed) leave us in the moral clear, or perhaps warrant praise, such as condemning or trying to stop their wrongdoing. But other ways of relating to the wrongdoing of others seem to implicate us as well, such as egging on a bully or driving a getaway car. Certain ways of relating seem to be a form of morally problematic participation in the wrongdoing. In order for the notion of complicity to be helpful in resolving our tension and accounting for the morality of climate change, we need an explanation of what that relation is, call it R, which counts as morally problematic participation.

The central traditional case of complicity is that of the accomplice, and interprets the relation, R, which counts as morally problematic participation, as a meaningful, intentional causal contribution to another individual’s wrongdoing. If I pass along bank codes to you and then you use them to siphon off money from various accounts, I am complicit in your robbery because of my meaningful, intentional causal contribution to the robbery, even though I am

48 not a robber myself. Distinguish this from some passerby who opens the door to the bank from the street, and in doing so lets the robber exit (assume the door was locked from the inside and the robber couldn’t have exited otherwise, so as to make the causal contribution more meaningful). This admittedly meaningful causal contribution doesn’t seem morally problematic because it was unintentional and the passerby didn’t share the aim of the robber.

In the context of the climate problem, though, we cannot appeal to this kind of relation, R, to constitute problematic participation. Precisely what is at issue is whether any individual is doing wrong. There is not already a wrong that can be independently specified, like the robbery, in order to hitch anyone else’s wagon to as complicit. So we cannot, without circularity, use this central traditional notion of complicity to establish some such wrong.44

More recently, scholars and the public discourse have shifted toward less traditional uses of the term ‘complicity’ to cover cases where people seem to do wrong together in a way that no individual does on his or her own. Rather than just indicating a relation of morally problematic participation between an individual and someone else’s independently specifiable wrong, these more recent uses of the term indicate a relation of problematic participation between an individual and some collective agent’s wrong or some non-agential structural process that produces harm or injustice. However, just expanding the target to include collectives and structural processes is not enough to generate an account of complicity in climate destruction.

44 Moreover, given what we said about causal tracing in the above section on harm attribution, it doesn’t seem plausible that our behavior in the climate case would meet the conditions for meaningful causal contribution, nor does it look like there would be the shared intentions, aims, or mental states. I will say more about these points below as I trot out alternative conceptions of “complicity”.

In the traditional case, what made the relation one of problematic participation was that of meaningful, intentional causal contribution, but as we saw above in the section on harm, this doesn’t seem plausible in the climate case. So we would have to appeal to a different kind of relation than meaningful, intentional causal contribution in order to define what would constitute problematic participation.

Christopher Kutz defends an account of complicity whereby merely intentionally participating in a collective action that causes collective harm is the relation, R, which constitutes problematic participation.45 He has a version of an argument for this with respect to what he thinks are genuinely collective actions.46 He also has a version of an argument for this with respect to structural processes which do not count as genuinely collective actions

45 Christopher Kutz Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Kutz takes this strategy in the face of what he calls, I think rightly, the “the most important and far- reaching…wrongs of contemporary life” (p. 113). One need not make a difference or have some causal control over the realization of the harms or express some malicious intention or vice in doing so. He thinks this account allows him to make sense of complicity in cases like the Dresden bombing. 46 Collective actions for Kutz consist of networks of individuals intentionally doing their part of what they conceive of as a collective project, when their individual conceptions of that group project overlap sufficiently. To clarify the concept of collective action through overlapping participatory intention, consider going on a picnic with a friend. We might plan the day such that I bring the food and she brings the activities. In this kind of case, how we act individually is best understood and explained by our participatory intentions in a joint effort; namely, picnicking together. Her action plays a role in making sense of my action, as does my action with respect to hers. We are part of a collective action with each other in a way that we are not with the man sitting on the park bench next to us, with whom we share geographical proximity, but no overlapping intentions to be part of a group project. Kutz, Complicity, p. 138. It is worth clarifying what Kutz means by “intentionally participating in collective actions” in order to evaluate whether this kind of picture might be conducive towards giving an account of climate morality. I worry that with climate change, the “contents” our individual intentions are not sufficiently overlapping and oriented around being a part of a collective project so as to count as a “collective action” in his sense. But that was the very mechanism that was supposed to be necessary for an individual to be complicit in a collective harm. Kutz offers a position in which collective action is the basis for moral accountability, and shared or overlapping participatory intention is the device that both generates a truly collective action and determines who bears a complicitous share of any collective wrongdoing. So if and only if we share in the participatory intention to do some collective action do we meet the condition for being implicated in the collective harm. Kutz, Complicity, p. 114. It doesn’t seem likely that we are thinking of ourselves as part of a group project when we do things like drive, fly, or cool our homes. Our interests, goals, and reasons behind GHG emissions are radically different. If you didn’t emit, I still would and vice versa, and thus there is no strong need to make reference to your emissions to make sense of or explain my emissions. This is quite unlike the picnic, but furthermore also quite unlike others kinds of collective actors we recognize like sports teams, departments, clubs, corporations, or governments. It is important to realize that something like the Paris Accords do not change this. At most, if we can construe the Paris agreement as the right kind of collective action, in virtue of overlapping participatory intentions, it would attach people (in a complicity-like way) to a collective benefit rather than explain responsibility for the collective harm it purports to remedy and which necessitates something like the Paris agreement in the first place.

50 but that produce harm or injustice.47 Regardless of whether one thinks that our climate behavior can count as participating in a genuinely collective act or not, both of these accounts are hollow as accounts of what counts as “problematic participation” in a collective wrong or structural process. With respect to climate change, they do not seem to move us beyond the claim, which was never in question, that individuals intentionally emit GHGs.

Instead they merely slap a label of “complicity” on to it.48 This picture simply conflates the distinction between intentional participation and problematic participation. The subsistence farmer driving to sell her goods at market once a week, the middle class American, and the billionaire private jet owner all intentionally participate, but that doesn’t go any way to explaining who participates problematically, to what degree, and what it would mean to avoid participating problematically.49 Which tells me that the entirety of the philosophical

47 See ch. 6, Kutz, Complicity. Kutz employs the term “quasi participation” to cover the ways we participate in more “unstructured collectives” where there isn’t a clear specific project to which individuals intend to participate in like the picnic or the Dresden bombing. This is supposed to be the argumentative move that most clearly speaks to cases like environmental damage, and by extension climate change. Even if each individual is using it for their own ends, when we drive, for instance, we know that the gasoline we use is tied up in an economic network of extraction, refinement, distribution, etc. And perhaps the same story could be told about electricity use and the energy grid and other aspects of carbon intensive markets and infrastructure. The idea is that even if we do not explicitly conceive of our actions in this way, we are part of a “culture” or “deeply sedimented” and “integrated” way of life that provides more unification across persons that we might think. Kutz borrows the notion of a ‘habitus” from Pierre Bourdieu to refer to “the durable complexes of dispositions of thinking, acting, and feeling that unify and individuate members of social groups.” Kutz, Complicity, p. 187-8. We don’t get to define, enter, or exit these ourselves but they inform and condition our behavior in a way that could serve as the basis for ascriptions of complicity in the absence of a specific shared intention, perhaps even if we do not know that we are participating in a practice that collectively causes harm. Kutz also thinks there are “symbolic” reasons to avoid participating in unstructured collective harms because participating can reveal their characters and commitments (p. 190). This however brings us back to the virtue- based strategies and what I said above, especially regarding the need for an account of why particular character traits might be vicious or symbolically problematic. 48 Echoing problems we saw face the imperceptible harms account and the virtue account. 49 Kutz seems to sometimes slip into implying that through our participation we are responsible for ‘the collective harm’. Kutz thinks that the “subject” of accountability is the individual, but the “object” of accountability is the collective harm. This appears to imply that, if complicit, I am responsible for a collective harm; I am responsible for climate change. But that seems wildly too general and blunt as a way of conceptualizing responsibility. At most my participation is what gets me on the hook for some share of the collective harm (a difficulty we’ve already worked through above in dealing with harm-based strategies) but Kutz gives no aid for distributing or allocating practical responsibilities among those complicit through their participation. Without doing so, this sounds dangerously near Karl Jaspers implausible theory of responsibility which makes each individual responsible for all wrongs (no restriction on extent or magnitude), and with no identified way of apportioning. Jaspers says, “there exists a solidarity among men as human beings that makes each co- responsible for every wrong and every injustice in the world, especially for crimes committed in his presence or

51 work in order to specify the relation, R, that one bears to climate change such that it counts as problematic participation is still to be done. Until we have that, we don’t have anything.

The takeaway from this section is not that there is no possible R to make ascriptions of complicity meaningful in the climate domain. I have only sampled a few possibilities in this section (and by extension in the other sections of this chapter), and there are countless others one could trot out, including (as the most plausible ones) many varieties of an R that takes the shape of using ‘too much’, or ‘more than one’s fair share’ of a certain resource. The point is that we should be able to see now that, just like the virtue-theoretic strategies needed a way to distinguish behaviors and traits as virtues from vices, the complicity strategy is a mere placeholder notion, which gets its moral force by being parasitic on an independently identified deontic account of a certain kind of morally problematic relation to the structural processes that produce climate change, i.e., an account of what constitutes problematic participation.

Fortunately, like I suggested can be done for the “virtue” language, the distributive- justice based view that I develop is, I think, best-positioned to provide an account of such a relation and interpretation of what constitutes problematic participation, and therefore recover plausible language about “complicity” in the climate context, if one so desires to meaningfully use it.

Section Five: The Collectivist Strategy

In the previous sections I examined four strategies to resolve the fundamental tension and account for climate morality by salvaging a notion of individual responsibility. In this final section I consider a fifth strategy, which represents a significant departure from the

with his knowledge. If I fail to do whatever I can to prevent them, I too am guilty.” Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, trans. E. B. Ashton. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001[1947]), p. 26.

52 first four and suggests that resolving the tension requires a shift in focus from individual to collective responsibility.50 I recognize the crucially important insight in this shift, and agree that is plausibly assures us that we needn’t fear climate responsibility nihilism. However, I argue that even embracing an absolutely essential place for collective responsibility in one’s account of climate morality, there are still strong reasons to assess whether there are any individual duties which inform or are informed by such collective duties in order to compellingly account for climate morality.

The idea that climate morality ultimately is a matter of collective responsibility, is typified in the climate ethics literature by, among others, Henry Shue, Walter Sinnott-

Armstrong, Martino Traxler, etc.51 Since we do not have a global state to serve as the collective agent responsible for the global problem of climate change, the working assumption by scholars has been that nation states are the relevant collectives. This is true also of actual climate negotiations, where the framing language of the UNFCCC assumes that states, as the parties to the agreement, are the bearers of responsibility for climate change.52

50 There is a separate debate about the ontology of collective responsibility that I do not intend to weigh in on. My remarks should be relevant regardless of whether one is happy to reject the methodological individualist constraint and accept the existence of irreducibly collective agents or if one insists on preserving the methodological individualist constraint and develops other ways of talking about nation states, collective actions, and the like without countenancing collective agents, per se. 51 See, e.g., Sinnott-Armstrong, “It’s Not My Fault”, p. 312, as well as Martino Traxler’s, ‘‘Fair Chore Division for Climate Change,” Social Theory and Practice 28 (2002): 101–34, Darrel Moellendorf’s work in “Treaty Norms and Climate Change Mitigation,” Ethics and International Affairs (2009): 347-265 and “Taking UNFCCC Norms Seriously” in Clare Heyward & Dominic Roser (eds.), Climate Justice in a Non-Ideal World. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2016), 104-124, much of Henry Shue’s language can be interpreted this way throughout his work in Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), and many others. 52 The expression is that “The Parties should protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations of humankind, on the basis of equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities. Accordingly, the developed country Parties should take the lead in combating climate change and the adverse effects thereof.” United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 1992; available at http://unfccc.int/files/essential_background/background_publications_htmlpdf/application/pdf/conveng.pd f

States seem to have the right kinds of internal organizational structures, governing procedures, and decision making processes to be good candidates for collective responsibility. They also seem to have significant enough causal power to truly make a difference in the way that no individual person can. With states conceived as the actors bearing responsibility, we are in a much better position to make reasonable expected utility calculations about their behavior in a way that we struggled with the individual agent.53 Some state’s total emissions might even be enough to trigger the kinds of threshold mechanisms that do actually surface in climate change, as we saw was implausible for individuals.54 And while, unilateral action by one powerful state won’t be enough in isolation to stay within our carbon budget, it has much more political signaling and example-setting power than an individual unilaterally adopting radical green virtues or zeroing out her carbon footprint.

These argumentative moves seem promising to ward off the wholly skeptical conclusion that would have us treat climate change like a random asteroid strike. We have agents at least, collective ones, to pin responsibility on so it doesn’t merely vanish into the ether. This may solve the most basic problem, but beyond that, is not yet a particularly enlightening account of climate morality.

What I want to suggest is that acknowledging the importance of states, qua collective institutions, is necessary for an account of climate morality but not sufficient. Indeed collectives, state and non-state, are an absolutely critical part of the view I ultimately

53 This is important so that the move to collective responsibility doesn’t just spin another collective action problem that defeats moral responsibility one step higher in the food chain. After all, Tuvalu itself cannot make much of a dent in avoiding climate change, neither can the Philippines, nor Brazil and so on down the list without others cooperating. Stephen Gardiner has presented this concern in multiple places. See, e.g., “Is No One Responsible for Global Environmental Tragedy?: Climate Change as a Challenge to Our Ethical Concepts” in The Ethics of Global Climate Change, ed, Donald Arnold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 38-59. 54 For instance if Canada burned all of its tar sands.

54 develop.55 Importantly, however, their centrality does not mitigate against the need to provide an account of individual responsibility. Instead, I think it informs us that we need to carefully theorize the relationship between the individual and various levels of collective institutions with the actual power to monitor and regulate GHG use, climatic and associated geopolitical threats, coordinate behavior, etc., so as to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

As climate ethicists, policy-makers, and lay folks alike have homed in on, states will be a central players in that story. However, even though a few states could unilaterally upend global hopes of avoiding catastrophic climate change, no state itself can solve climate change. This will require broader collective institutions to manage, facilitate, coordinate action and policy between states, of which the UNFCCC is but a small step.

There are two important preliminary reasons (more will fill in as I develop the account of global distributive justice to come) why even accepting the centrality of collective responsibility, we still need to provide an account of individual climate morality. The first reason is that whatever governments are required to do will redound down to their citizenry.

Imagine the U.S. as a collective is obligated to reduce its emissions by, say, 90% in order to fulfill its collective climate obligations. We are owed a story addressing how that collective climate burden should be distributed among individual citizens in a way that is fair and in

55 It is not altogether uncommon to hear claims of collective responsibility at lower levels than states, such as banks, the fossil fuel industry, corporations. See, e.g., Paul Griffin, “Climate Majors Database,” CDP, 2017, which tracks emissions to the top 100 fossil fuel production/extraction companies. In the popular media, articles continuously pop up like Andrea Germanos, “Biggest Banks Fueling Climate Disaster With Billions Poured Into “‘Extreme Fossil Fuels,’” Common Dreams, June 21 2017 https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/06/21/biggest-banks-fueling-climate-disaster-billions-poured- extreme-fossil-fuels. I think similar arguments as I develop for states apply here. Focusing on banks, or production similarly doesn’t account for distribution. Saying, for instance, to Exxon, that they need to cut their production by 80% doesn’t make any headway as to how that reduction distributes among individuals. While there are certainly things to say about profits, etc., a complete story of justice couldn’t be given just at the level of banks or producers/extractors. My ultimate view helps explain why they aren’t totally off the hook, why they’ll need to reduce production, and limit or re-distribute their profits, but also why we cannot just focus there.

55 accordance with the demands of morality. For instance, invoking an electricity curfew on poor neighborhoods or implementing a regressive carbon tax would be problematic. To defend an account of how to distribute a collective burden is, by another name, in part to give an account of individual climate morality.56

The second reason we still need to provide an account of individual morality even if we accept notions of collective responsibility is that, as we know all too tragically, governments, as such, are not living up to whatever responsibilities they may have. This dovetails with the idea just above that we need broader collective institutions to coordinate and enforce action between states. When a government is flouting its collective duties, as the

U.S. is by appointing climate deniers to positions of authority, rolling back restrictions on climate pollution, working to expand drilling operations and coal extraction, pulling out of the Paris Accords, etc. it is imperative as part of a moral theory to figure out what sort of responses are warranted or required by its citizens, bystanders, victims of climate change, etc.

Sometimes, especially when the moral interests at stake are significantly weighty, as in the context of climate change, it seems that other actors can at least be charged with compensating for the failure, or ‘picking up the slack’.57 To be sure, some of the slack of a nation failing its collective responsibilities might be picked up by other states, or at collective levels below that of the government, but above that of individuals.58 But certainly some of it

56 I am not suggesting that the climate change collectivist give a full theory of why citizens have to obey the law and mandates of their just and legitimate state, abide by its tax code, or inherit a duty to do their share within the state, but at a less fundamental level we need some accounting of the distribution. 57 See for instance David Miller’s “Taking up the slack? Responsibility and justice in situations of partial compliance” in Carl Knight & Zofia Stemplowska (eds.), Responsibility and Distributive Justice (Oxford University Press, 2011), 230-45, and Laura Valentini, “Ideal vs. Non-Ideal Theory: A Conceptual Map” Philosophy Compass 7/9 (2012): 654–664. Now, perhaps as we ultimately explain such secondary duties they will reference the failed primary duty (that primary duty being held by the collective, i.e., the government). At this point, I’m still trying to stay non-committal as to whether the ‘primary duty’ as I’ve called it is on governmental collectives. It might rest on a now non-existent global collective, or it might rest on individuals or groups of much smaller collectives. 58 For instance 350.org, Greenpeace, NRDC, Sierra Club, even states like California, municipalities, or corporations. See recently, Alessandra Potenza, “Three US states rebel against Trump's Paris climate agreement

56 would have to be picked up at the level of the individual. For one, many states are clearly not living up to their own responsibilities, much less picking up the tab for others, and we simply do not have the kind of low level communal structures adequate to solve the problem either.59 Moreover, even where other states and smaller collectives step in, the point above about distributing collective burdens recursively iterates; the duties of those other states or smaller collectives will redound to and distribute among individuals in ways that we must surely give a defensible account of.

It looks as though we should want an account of climate morality that can fluidly blend between a number of levels. It should aim to describe what adequate collective institutions with responsibility for mitigating climate change should look like and what they may be required to do. But the account should also be unified with a theory that explains responsibility for realizing such institutions when they do not currently exist and informs how such institutions should distribute that collective responsibility.

Throughout the rest of the dissertation I am going to propose and defend the view that upon careful scrutiny a particular kind of theory of global distributive justice is uniquely suited to serve this unifying role. I’m going to suggest that the very reasons why we need collective institutions of distributive justice to coordinate behavior and mitigate climate change generate individual climate duties as a species of individual duties of distributive justice, both to participate in the creation of just climate institutions and regulate their use of particular climate relevant resources.

withdrawal,” The Verge, 6/1/2017, https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/1/15726974/california-new-york- washington-climate-change-coalition-paris-deal-trump and Alex Kirby, “Climate change legislation sees huge increase” Climate News Network, 5/11/2017, http://climatenewsnetwork.net/climate-change-legislation-huge- increase/. 59 Shue has at times suggested that it is “other national governments… constituting the remainder of the international community” who this falls to, and part of the reason is because states are the agents with potential efficacy. At the same time he recognizes that, “every state is a ‘failed state’ as far as climate is concerned,” which helps indicate my point that it will have to happen at non-state levels. See Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection, pp. 301-2.

Concluding Remarks

In this chapter, I have raised and evaluated four separate kinds of strategies to salvage a meaningful notion of individual responsibility, and one strategy to shift the level of analysis to collective responsibility, in order to account for climate morality. I argued that attempts centered on attributing harms to individuals, using simple Kantian resources, appealing to virtues, and employing notions of complicity fail to adequately account for climate morality. However, I suggested that an account could be given to redeem much of the language the Kantian, virtue theorist, or complicity theorist. Finally, I argued that in recognizing the normative importance of states and other collective institutions, there are still considerable reasons to develop an adequate theory of individual climate morality to properly understand those collective institutions.

Climate Change and Distributive Justice

Introduction

In this chapter I suggest that the way forward for developing an adequate account of the morality of climate change, in light of the revealing lessons from the last chapter, is to develop a particular kind of theory of global distributive justice. I lay the preliminary groundwork for that task here, as a kind of proof of concept, to pave the way for a fuller development of such a theory in the subsequent two chapters.

I begin by reframing the problem of climate change as a moral problem regarding the overuse of a scarce, valuable, rival, non-excludable global resource that no one owns. Understood thusly, we will be in a position to see why a particular kind of theory of distributive justice is promising for developing an adequate account of climate morality because it is uniquely suited to accomplish the important tasks we saw to be valuable at the end of the last chapter.

First, it can do justice to the important lesson from the collectivists in the last chapter that an adequate climate morality essentially involves collective institutions with capacity to intervene on climatic disruption. Second, it can seamlessly characterize what morally defensible and authoritative collective institutions with responsibility for mitigating climate change should look like and what they may be required to do, including how to distribute that collective responsibility. Third, it is well positioned to simultaneously explain what responsibilities people have in a “pre-institutional” setting, prior to the existence of such institutions, including restricting one’s use of particular climate relevant resources as well as participating in the creation of such institutions. Fourth and finally, it is also capable of illuminating the relationship between these pre-institutional responsibilities and how they might inform or constrain the ultimate structure of defensible institutions and their

59 distribution of duties. Accomplishing these tasks is the high water mark for a compelling theory of the morality of climate change, and the right kind of theory of global distributive justice can do so in a unified way.

I end the chapter by locating the theoretical groundwork I have laid within a historical tradition in political philosophy to help clarify the structure of the proposed strategy and prepare the way for building out the groundwork in the next two chapters.

Section One: Re-Framing the Moral Problem

In this section I aim to reframe the moral problem of climate change by exposing a number of its core elements. By teasing these apart, and highlighting them, we will be well placed to see it as a moral problem fit for a particular kind of theory of distributive justice.

I want to suggest that massive global harms that we are currently suffering and which threaten even further devastation in the future, which result from the aggregation of billions of people’s behaviors, can at root be understood as resulting from the overuse of a scarce, valuable, rival, non-excludable global resource that no one owns. This claim requires some unpacking, however, which I take up in the following five subsections.

The Resource

While discussions of climate change often mention carbon emissions or, more generally, greenhouse gasses (GHGs), the real resource in question that I aim to pick out (as being scarce, valuable, rival, non-excludable, global, and unowned) is more complicated.

None of the harms from climate change are simply a result of massive emissions, but instead they are a matter of emissions that outstrip the planet’s capacity to safely absorb or assimilate them in the atmosphere or through “carbon sinks” (processes, activities, or mechanisms that remove

GHGs from the atmosphere such as oceans, soil, and vegetation). Call this resource the

Earth’s “atmospheric absorptive capacity” (henceforth AAC).1

While this is technically a balance between in-flow and out-flow, the rate of current emissions greatly out-paces the rate of removal of GHGs from the atmosphere. This is partly a function of how long CO2 is now understood to stay in the atmosphere before decomposition or re-assimilation (hundreds of years if not incalculably higher). This means that reductions in GHG emissions only slow the rate of growth of GHGs in the atmosphere rather than reducing the total amount. Over time periods relevant for human interests in avoiding climate catastrophe, essentially, any GHG emissions put up there stay there, increasing the atmospheric concentration of GHGs and thereby removing a share of what is a functionally fixed budget before totally outstripping AAC.2

Its Value

The ability to use and benefit from the use of AAC is tremendously valuable for individual welfare. If it were not there would be little risk of over using it. This is not to say that AAC use is intrinsically valuable, for its own sake. It is not. Furthermore, my claim that

AAC use is valuable is not to say that people explicitly or consciously value it. It is such an abstract resource they likely do not.

Using AAC is valuable because of what activities it lets us do and what kinds of lives it lets us lead. Such activities and lives are possible—and this is a good thing—without using

AAC (e.g., when renewable sources of energy replace fossil fuels). But the fact that AAC use

1 For a selection of others that discuss this idea see Shue, Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection, Martino Traxler, ‘‘Fair Chore Division for Climate Change,” Steve Vanderheiden, “Climate Change and the Challenge of Moral Responsibility,” Ethics and the Life Sciences (2006): 85-92, Megan Blomfield, “Global Common Resources and the Just Distribution of Emission Shares” The Journal of Political Philosophy: 21(3) (2013): 283–304. 2 As Henry Shue says, “the fact that the decomposition occurs only over such an extended time frame means that for all practical purposes—that is, as far as human interests are concerned—the concentration of CO2 is simply expanding indefinitely, now that we are ejecting so much more from fossil fuel burning.” See Shue, Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection, p. 303-5.

61 is fungible does not detract from the idea that it is valuable in a given context. And contingently, many of our behaviors and activities depend and have depended for years upon

AAC use, from those that support our most basic needs to those that satisfy our wildest fancies. Economic growth and development are historically and currently correlated with increases in GHG emissions (and thus AAC use).3 Such growth and development have been core determinants of health, education, opportunity, and other aspects that undoubtedly contribute to wellbeing.4

In a world with an overabundance of cheap, totally clean energy, AAC use might hold little value because everything that it could be put to use for could otherwise be easily achieved and there would be no reason to use AAC. This is in fact the goal of transition to a fossil free economy. But in our world as it has been and will continue to be in the near term, given facts about energy poverty, lack of access to alternatives (e.g., with respect to air travel), the carbon intensive structures within which we are embedded, etc., AAC use holds significant value.5

3 Compare for instance, Human Development Index data from the United Nations Development Program, Human Development Reports (available at http://hdr.undp.org/en/data) with historical emissions data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, International Energy Statistics (available at http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/IEDIndex3.cfm?tid=5&pid=5&aid=8). 4 One way to help see the general value of AAC is to imagine that we had enough AAC neutral (green, alternative) energy to maintain exactly the quality of life of the wealthiest 50% around the globe (capacity we do not yet have) so as to be able to put all of our AAC use budget that I will discuss below, that would otherwise go toward maintain the lifestyles of the affluent, toward poverty relief. We could, in short order, likely lift billions out of poverty. 5 This isn’t to say that specifying exactly how valuable AAC use is for any given individual and for any activities or patterns of activity is a simple affair. Manifestly it isn’t. There are all manner of “willingness to pay” studies that survey people’s willingness to pay, for instance, an electricity fee or carbon tax in order to combat climate change. And we might attempt to track the value of AAC use in a more concretely specified way to such preferences as revealed in willingness to pay studies (the idea being that the more one is willing to pay to continue using, e.g., GHGs, the more one values AAC use). Unfortunately, these strategies cannot track the actual value of AAC use. It is more likely to track things like one’s ability to pay (i.e., a wealthy individual may be willing to pay a larger monthly fee, but not because it is more valuable to them, just because doing so would be less burdensome), or it may track individual’s ignorance about how important meeting our climate targets is. In a recent study by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, 57% of American were only willing to pay a $1 monthly electricity fee to combat climate change. That kind of fee is nowhere near enough to prevent catastrophic climate change, and seeing that people are only willing to pay so little shouldn’t tell us that avoiding catastrophic climate change by not overusing AAC isn’t particularly valuable, instead we should conclude that people don’t fully appreciate how valuable avoiding it really is. Of course, this shouldn’t surprise

Ownership

I will say more in Chapter Four about distributive shares or entitlements to use and benefit from the use of AAC, but prima facie it seems right to say that it is globally unowned and not otherwise subject to recognized fair or legitimate claims. We don’t have recognized property regimes, private or otherwise, to manage the use, purchase, sale, transfer, etc., of

AAC. It is not recognized by global or local social and political institutions that recognize and make meaningful more standard claims to ownership like land, a house, or a bike, or even more esoteric kinds of resources like the broadcast spectrum where rights to exclusive use of certain bands of frequencies in certain localities are bought, sold, and legally recognized.6 Those more standard claims to ownership conceive of ownership as entailing the entitlement or protected dominion to: access, use, manage, exclude, derive income from, or transfer a good.7 There are no received mechanisms for conceptualizing any of those protections or entitlements, regarding AAC, even if people certainly are using the resource.

And it is very plausible initially to think that ownership/property rights exist and receive their meaning from constructed processes that recognize and govern them.8

us. If they did, the problem of addressing it would be so much less difficult. See “Reducing Carbon Emissions”, accessed August 23, 2017, http://www.apnorc.org/PDFs/EnergyClimate/Fact%20Sheets_2%20Carbon%20Policies_Final.pdf. 6 Thanks to Henry Richardson for this last illustrative example. 7 In his discussion of Tony Honoré’s famous contribution to property theory, David Miller explain “Property is a set of claim rights and powers held by individuals over material things, including land, which entail corresponding obligations and liabilities on the part of other individuals. In his now famous account of the ‘full liberal concept of ownership’, Honoré lists eleven ‘standard incidents of ownership’, most of which are rights and powers—such as the right to possess, the right to use, and the power to transmit.” p. 92 David Miller, “Property and Territory: Locke, Kant, and Steiner,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 19.1 (2011): 90–109. See also Gregory Alexander and Eduardo Peñalver, An Introduction to Property Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) for a helpful inroad to thinking about property theory. 8 Consider, for instance, as an analog the broadcast spectrum. There exists a fixed range of frequencies of electromagnetic waves as a matter of the laws of nature is simply a fact (and not merely a terrestrial one); but rights to (exclusive) use of bands of these frequencies (in certain localities) are importantly bought and sold.

This is importantly not to say that there are no binding norms governing the use or benefit from the use of AAC in a pre-institutional setting. I argue in the next chapter that there are significant binding norms, but they are not norms of ownership.

Its Scarcity

AAC is scarce in a particular way that is inherently indexed to a moralized notion of safety. Scarcity, thus, does not merely track the earth’s total calculated global carbon reserves. Rather, AAC is scarce in the sense that it indicates that we have a finite budget of

AAC before we face unacceptable risk of global harm.9 This translates into a budget for carbon emissions that is much smaller than simply calculating global carbon reserves.

We can call this type of scarcity “functional scarcity”, which is determined contextually within a specific time frame, with respect to a specific body of practices, and interdependent with some other networks of moral norms.10 So, for example, while it is true that no matter what, there is a finite amount of GHGs that can be absorbed before the temperature increases 2°C from today by 2100, AAC would not be functionally scarce if I were the only one emitting GHGs because with plausible, foreseeable, projected, unhindered emissions, I surely could not hit that threshold. The same is not true if you add a billion other people, in addition to me.

There are debates about identifying what risk threshold (in terms of deaths, disease burden, and other miseries associated with climate change) is morally defensible in

9 As Henry Shue once put it, “There are limits to the net quantities of these gases that the atmosphere can handle without making adjustments, such as surface temperature increases, that are quite uncongenial to humans and many other species of plants and animals,” Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection, pp. 79-80. 10 Henry Shue has a helpful discussion for thinking about resource limits where he distinguishes between resources that 1) are totally subject to human discretion (like the money supply) 2) can be increased some measure through investment of money, time, ingenuity 3) are out of control, but for all practical purposes unlimited (like sunlight) 4) resources that for practical purposes cannot be increased by humans. Ultimately, AAC falls relatively neatly in category 4. Unfortunately, as Shue notes, many resources believed to be in 3 are actually 2 or 4, and that can cause problems when scarcity “locks in”. See Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection pp. 77-82.

64 interpreting AAC’s scarcity and coming to a conclusion about the budget. The normative framework and assumptions one approaches the task with do have downstream effects. I will sidestep the bigger debates for now and, for the purposes of this argument to see the structure of the view which could be modified with different inputs, simply accept the closest we have to a consensus, coming out of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and later negotiations by its signatories, used by the IPCC, and the World Bank, among others. Their figures already take into account conservative and liberal estimates in settling on the final numbers.

The explicit formulation in the UNFCCC of a reasonable risk avoidance aim is stated as “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” That risk threshold, although vague as quoted, has been filled in with a general target of keeping global mean temperature increases less than 2°C above pre-industrial temperatures.11

This temperature goal then corresponds to a goal for a limit of average global atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases (approximately 450 parts per million

CO2eq), and that translates into figures establishing a global AAC budget, accounting for emissions and carbon sinks (and recognizing the point from above that on human time scales that matter essentially all new emissions add to the total stock of GHGs, and thus

11 Obviously there is variation in modeling and risk assessment and many are critical of the 2°C mark, thinking that it was too arbitrarily chosen and does not track the most morally relevant category and instead we should determine our budgeting on 1.5°C. Indeed Article 2 of the Paris Agreement shows that there is aspirational momentum towards aiming at 1.5°C as our moral target, but for elucidative purposes I will focus more on the IPCC figures which use the 2°C mark. I will not attempt to settle this controversy here as I am still trying to lay out the conceptual framework, regardless of that specific number. Of some of the commentators that think the target really ought to be 1.5°C, to avoid intolerable damage to vulnerable regions, the target atmospheric concentration would translate to about 350 ppm. Depending on climate sensitivity, some scientists think that emissions may basically need to go to zero by 2020 to meet our target. See, James Hansen, et al. “Target atmospheric CO2: Where should humanity aim?” Open Atmos. Sci. J., 2 (2008): 217-231.

65 their concentration, in the atmosphere). Because GHGs dissipate roughly uniformly throughout the atmosphere, this budget is a global constraint.12

In its Fifth Assessment Report, the IPCC lays out targets for avoiding dangerous climate change.13 The IPCC estimates that in order to achieve the above atmospheric concentrations and stay within our overall AAC budget, global GHG emissions must be 40-

70% lower in 2050 than they were in 2010, and further decline to near zero (if not less) by

2100.14 Such estimates require “further substantial reductions” beyond what has been pledged already in international treaties.15 Without additional efforts to reverse the projected growth in GHG emissions predicted for nearly all sectors,16 we will blow past the 450 ppm

CO2eq limit by 2030, putting us on track for devastating average temperature increases of

3.7°C to 4.8°C by 2100.17

Very importantly, however, I do not mean my ultimate account to be beholden to these figures in particular; this is to be seen as a model for whatever the true figures actually

12 This is important down the line for a number of reasons, one being that when we start thinking about distributive principles, some actors might emit more than average, while being consistent with climate goals, so long as the difference is made up elsewhere (and there may be good reasons to do just this, e.g., to achieve similar capabilities, or for efficiency’s sake, etc.). 13 The presentation of the following material draws on similar presentation in Colin Hickey, Travis Rieder, and Jake Earl, “Population Engineering and the Fight against Climate Change,” Social Theory and Practice 42 (4) (2016): 845-870. 14 IPCC 2014, “Summary for Policymakers,” in Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, eds. Ottmar Edenhofer et al. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 10, https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg3/ipcc_wg3_ar5_summary-for-policymakers.pdf. 15 Ibid., p. 12. This quote is in reference to the state of play prior to the Paris accords (and prior to the Trump administration announcing it would withdraw from them), but as discussed in the footnote below, the point remains. 16 Ibid., p. 10-12. 17 Ibid., p. 8. Even in the wake of Paris, the agreement’s voluntary national mitigation commitments still commit us to between 2.7°C and 3.5°C of warming. For various assessments see, e.g., Joeri Rogelj, et al., “Paris Agreement Climate Proposals Need a Boost to Keep Warming Well below 2°C,” Nature 534 (2016): 631-39, International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook Special Briefing for COP21 [Paris: OECD/IEA, 2015], p. 4, http://www.iea.org/media/news/WEO_INDC_Paper_Final_WEB.PDF; and Louise Jeffrey, et al., “Climate Action Tracker Update,” Climate Action Tracker, December 8, 2015, http://climateactiontracker.org/assets/publications/briefing_papers/CAT_Temp_Update_COP21.pdf; and Bill McKibben “Climate Deal: The Pistol Has Fired, so Why Aren’t We Running?,” The Guardian, December 13, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/13/paris-climate-talks-15c-marathon- negotiating-physics.

66 are. If anything I suspect these IPCC figures will turn out to be overly conservative, and we should strongly push closer to the 1.5°C aspiration, or smaller, given credible expert analysis and reports from those involved with the IPCC Working Group III’s drafting process which suggest that the final policy recommendations are overly optimistic, a consequence of political pressure from drafters with vested economic interests in delaying action on climate change.18 Moreover, the IPCC estimates for required GHG emissions reductions only make it “likely” that we would avoid the conservative 2°C mark. On their understanding of

“likely”, that means there is as high as a 33% chance that we would still would surpass 2°C.19

While I will eventually attempt to draw some moral and practical implications from the imperfect data and estimations I here employ, which might seem to be a problem, it is really no different situation than we all face as non-omniscient, fallible practical reasoners making decisions in uncertainty. The only option, even if vulnerable to error or non- optimality in certain ways, is to reason about the best evidence, information, and predictions we have.

18 See Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, “Beyond ‘Dangerous’ Climate Change: Emission Scenarios for a New World,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 369 (2011): 20-44 and Nafeez Ahmed, “IPCC Reports ‘Diluted’ under ‘Political Pressure’ to Protect Fossil Fuel Interests,” The Guardian, May 15, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/may/15/ipcc-un-climate-reports-diluted- protect-fossil-fuel-interests. 19 IPCC 2014, “Summary for Policymakers” (WGIII), pp. 4 (n. 2), 10, 13 (Table SPM.1). One recent study suggests that there is a 95% chance that we surpass the 2°C by the end of the century and another suggests that even if humans stopped using fossil fuels immediately the earth will continue to warm by about 2°C by the end of the century, and if we continue apace for just another 15 years that will turn to 3°C by the end of the century. See Adrian E. Raftery et al., “Less than 2°C Warming by 2100 Unlikely,” Nature Climate Change, 2017, doi:10.1038/nclimate3352 and Thorsten Mauritsen and Robert Pincus, “Committed Warming Inferred from Observations,” Nature Climate Change, 2017, doi:10.1038/nclimate3357. This is to say that AAC, as such, may already be used up and any additional emissions are drawing a debt, or using atmospheric space beyond its capacity. The theory I ultimately develop is meant to be forward- and backward-looking in a way that is consistent with the possibility that AAC is already used up. If so, then it is possible that even with everyone limiting their atmospheric resource use to the thresholds I go on to discuss in Chapter 4 (secure self- preservation and effective agency) we still surpass the AAC threshold and then are in a tragic dilemma trading fundamental values. So what I refer to as “AAC use” might actually be “excess atmospheric use”. Other new research still suggests that there are pathways forward to stay within AAC and avoid 2°C and even 1.5°C. See Mark Jacobson, et al., “100% Clean and Renewable Wind, Water, and Sunlight All-Sector Energy Roadmaps for 139 Countries of the World,” Joule 1 (2017): 1-14. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2017.07.005.

Global Rivalness and Non-Excludability

Finally, as a resource, AAC is what Elinor Ostrom has helpfully termed a “common pool resource”.20 Common pool resources are natural or manmade resource system with two defining features. First, they are “subtractable” or “rival”. This means that what one person harvests from or deposits in a mutually desirable resource subtracts from another’s ability to do the same.21 This makes common pool resources prone to overuse, which is especially true the more valuable the resources is, and we know from above AAC carries significant value.

In addition, common pool resources are “non-excludable” or “open access”. This means that it is difficult to prevent potential users from accessing the resource. Each potential user then faces the temptation to free ride and gain benefits from the resource without contributing to its upkeep by, for instance, regulating one’s use of the resource or replenishing its stock.

With AAC in particular as a common pool resource, in addition to the sense in which it is a global resource that I’ve already mentioned (because GHGs dissipate uniformly in the atmosphere so our scarce budget is constrained as a global budget), another important formal property worth stressing is that it needs to be understood as a global common pool resource. This is the case because all humans are potential (most are actual) rival users whom it is difficult to exclude. These two traits are exactly what set up classical tragedy of the

20 See Nives Dolšak and Elinor Ostrom, “The challenges of the commons” in N. Dolšak and E. Ostrom (eds), The Commons in the New Millennium: Challenges and Adaptations (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 3–34 and Blomfield, “Global Common Resources and the Just Distribution of Emission Shares”. 21 Again, recalling the length of time GHGs remain in the atmosphere before decomposition or re-assimilation, the AAC budget is for practical purposes, at human time scales that matter, fixed and zero sum. If I emit and take some of the AAC budget, it is some portion less that can be taken by other emissions. See Shue, Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection, p. 308, 332.

68 commons scenarios, which require norm-governed institutional apparatuses of some form or another to rectify.22

Section Two: A Theory that Recognizes the Importance of Collective Institutions

After being unpacked in this way, we can begin to see why there is promise in developing a particular kind of theory of distributive justice in order to give an adequate account of climate morality. First, such a theory is well positioned to do justice to the important lesson from the collectivists in the last chapter that an adequate climate morality essentially involves collective institutions.

Given AAC’s nature as a scarce, valuable, unowned, global common-pool resource that is rival (so prone to overuse) and non-excludable (so encourages free-riding), we require the existence of justly organized collective institutions to govern the use of AAC. Call these

“Just Climate Governing Institutions”.

There is a need for just climate governing institutions simply to prevent the problems of overuse and free riding. There is a short-, medium-, and long-term global public interest in avoiding such overuse, which requires global coordination to relieve.23 There seems an obvious need for the creation of political institutions that are charged with, and uniquely situated to, coordinate and protect the public interest in preventing overuse of the resource.

The absence of institutions to protect the global public interest (in this case by not managing the use and distribution of the AAC) amounts to a global public harm; the defeat of an interest that almost everyone has. The need for governing institutions to avoid overuse is all

22 Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (3859) (1968): 1243–1248. See also Alexander and Peñalver, An Introduction to Property Theory, Ch. 1. 23 I am following Feinberg in terminology here and mean “a collection of specific interests of the same kind possessed by a large and indefinite number of private individuals.” See p. 27 of Joel Feinberg, “Environmental Pollution and the Threshold of Harm,” The Hastings Center Report, 14.3 (1984), pp. 27-31.

69 the more pressing when the public harm, if such problems are not prevented, is as drastic and far-reaching as those of climate change.

As I suggested in the previous chapter, while states will be a central players in the institutional mechanisms to solve these problems, no state itself can solve climate change and a number of states could unilaterally upend global hopes of avoiding catastrophic climate change. Therefore, ultimately, to secure against overuse and freeriding among states

(or individuals within states), stable and enduring broader, global, collective institutions are necessary to manage, facilitate, coordinate, and enforce action and policy between states. The

UNFCCC is but a small and fragile step to this end, as a voluntary agreement without secured plans for emissions reductions to avoid 2°C and no enforcement mechanisms to actually manage use of the resource, but it is likely the scaffolding onto which fuller blooded institutions will be built.

Section Three: A Theory that Captures the Distribution of Collective Institutional Responsibility

Unpacking the moral problem of climate change as one of the overuse of AAC allows us to see that there is significantly more promise in pursuing a particular kind of theory of distributive justice to account for climate morality than merely the fact that it recognizes the importance of collective institutions. It is also fit to avoid the mistake of thinking that a strong emphasis on collective institutions indicates a total shift away from, and/or the erasure of, individual climate duties. Such an account is also well positioned to seamlessly characterize what fair and morally defensible collective institutions with responsibility for mitigating climate change should look like and what they may be required to do, including how to distribute that collective responsibility, via an account of the distribution of individual shares of AAC as a resource and its concomitant permissions and restrictions on use.

It would not be enough to suggest institutions that simply prevent overuse of the resource. Capping the use of atmospheric space to within the AAC budget to achieve our atmospheric concentration and mean global temperature increase targets in just any old way won’t fly. For instance, giving all the use or benefit to North Dakotans or New Zealanders would be deeply unfair. Because the resource is unowned and widely valuable, some basic fairness and equal respect regarding distribution of the resource seems required for all potential users who, given that it is a global resource, span the globe.

In addition, it is widely recognized that even if we keep to the global 2°C (or more ambitious 1.5°C) target, thereby mitigating the worst risks and catastrophic consequences of using atmospheric space beyond its capacity, significant adaptation to local and regional climatic disturbances tied to AAC use within the target range will be required. Such local harms are differentially concentrated and the ability to cope with the effects of AAC use even within the global target range is largely dependent on whether one has been able to historically use and benefit from the use of that resource. This raises further elements of fairness and equality that just climate governing institutions need to be concerned with in transferring and allocating resources.

Therefore, it seems that both the use of AAC as a resource needs to be managed carefully at least through the end of the century, if not in perpetuity, as do the indirect effects of its use that are implicated as matters of fairness and equality. The institutional collectives charged with doing so, need the adaptability and flexibility to respond over time to changes in the empirical landscape. As commitments taken up in global action generate feedback, they need to be able to update scientific predictions and their normative implications and loop those results back into further institutional management and action.

As technologies, use-patterns, local weather events, and populations shift, the institutional structure governing AAC needs to be able to shift responsively.

This is precisely the work that a theory of distributive justice is designed to do; figure out how to fairly distribute shares of resources or access to the benefits of those resources and translate that result into an account of the distribution of responsibility regarding those resources. The general idea, which evidences another measure by which advancing a theory of distributive justice shows so much promise, is that an individual’s fairly assigned distributive share brings with it associated individual permissions, rights, and duties. Leaving much more to be said in the next chapter, these individual permissions and/or rights would be to use one’s share of AAC and the individual duties would be duties to not extend one’s use beyond one’s share of AAC, in virtue of other people’s distributive shares (and their permissions and/or rights). So if a fair distribution of resources would allocate 2 to W, 1 to

X, 2 to Y, and 3 to Z, each would have a pro-tanto responsibility to not take more.

There are of course many possible distributive schemes that one could defend. Such schemes would generate different corresponding accounts of individual permissions and restrictions on AAC use, and thereby different accounts of how institutional responsibility would be distributed. Reasonable disagreement is to be expected and different scholars will of course come down across the board.

This brief sketch of an argument is only a kind of ground clearing before specifying a proper account of what fair distribution of AAC use should look like, and what its implications for individual’s duties to restrict their use of AAC might be. In the next chapter, to fill this in, I will defend what I think is the most promising version of a just distributive scheme (regarding AAC use and its benefits) for global institutions to govern climate change that we can defend in advance of the existence of such institutions. Some aspects of the

72 institution’s ultimate distributive scheme depend on exercises of institutional authority and decision-making to settle ambiguities that can’t be settled in advance. So what I ultimately provide is the normative basis for, and constraints upon, those institutional decisions. To be clear, I do this by way of giving an argument about pre-institutional distributive shares and norms of pre-institutional resource use. If one is not convinced by the argument that those norms hold pre-institutionally, one could still adhere to it as an account of what distributively just climate governing institutions would look like. The two purposes to which

I put those arguments do not necessarily stand and fall together. But that we can present them in unity shows another aspect of the promise of developing a theory of distributive justice to provide an adequate account of climate morality.

Section Four: A Theory that Explains Pre-Institutional Responsibility

In addition to recognizing the importance of collective institutions and being tailor- made to provide an account of the fair distribution of institutional responsibility (via an account of the permissions, rights, and duties that attach to an individual’s distributive share and what its implications for individual’s duties to restrict their use of AAC might be), a distributive justice approach is also well positioned to simultaneously explain what responsibilities people have in a “pre-institutional” setting, prior to the existence of such institutions, including potentially restricting their use of AAC as well as participating in the creation of such institutions.24

24 It is tempting to think that whatever individual duties we currently have regarding climate change, in our pre- institutional setting, might be focused exclusively on the latter duties to participate in the creation of just climate governing institutions. Sinnott-Armstrong, “It’s Not My Fault” and Johnson, “Ethical Obligations in a Tragedy of the Commons,” seem to share this view. This is a natural impulse. After all, I have gone on about how important it is to have collective agents or institutions with the requisite ability to actually solve the given moral problem. One certainly might agree that, once the collective institutions of justice are established, they will distribute individual duties back downward to natural, individual agents to execute its collective acts, by way of issuing distributive shares and their attending duties. And therefore agree that eventually individuals would receive another bevy of climate duties (which will at that point amount to duties to comply with the determinations of just institutions). But until that redistribution, one might think that our pre-institutional story should end at duties to help create institutions. I think doing so would be a mistake, and my task in the next

If we have the idea that an adequate account of climate morality requires the existence of stable, enduring institutions of justice to fairly govern the distribution of AAC

(because of the structure of the moral problem regarding the overuse of a particular resource, AAC), it is a natural extension of the logic of the idea to see if the norms of fairness of distribution or use regarding the resource that should govern the institutions also apply in either the same or modified form prior to the existence of those institutions. Can we make sense of individual distributive shares and their attending permissions and/or rights to use and duties to restrict their use of AAC in a pre-institutional setting? Different scholars will come down one way or another on this question and their answer may partly depend on what distributive norms they think should govern the institutions. One aspect of the value in pursuing a distributive justice approach to developing a theory of climate morality is the ease and fluidity with which its argumentative resources allow us to ask questions across this divide and map out a relationship between the pre-institutional and post-institutional norms of distribution. As mentioned just above, I try to make good on this point by arguing that individuals are required to restrict their use, or benefit from the use, of AAC to within a specified justifiable range, in our present pre-institutional context. And this indeed serves as the normative basis, subject to some variation depending on certain limited institutional decision-making and authority, for what distributively just global institutions to govern climate change would look like in allocating access to that resource and its benefits.

Moreover, a theory that highlights the importance, and requires the existence, of institutions of justice of a certain form to fairly govern the distribution of AAC, which as we

chapter is to think carefully about what can be said about individuals’ distributive shares and duties to restrict usage of AAC in the pre-institutional setting. This deserves careful attention because it is precisely where critics will be most skeptical of adding anything beyond perhaps a network of “collectivization” duties (perhaps like those I articulate in Chapter 5) and where those sympathetic to the project of adding further duties have been struggling to provide a satisfactory justification for doing so.

74 have suggested do not yet exist, is a natural ally with a companion account of what kinds of duties agents bear to help create such institutions. This would seem to be the bridge between the acknowledgment of broad pre-institutional socio-structural moral problems regarding the use of a particular kind of resource, AAC, and the necessary institutions of justice and institutional assignment of rights and duties to actually solve such moral problems. Without such a corresponding account, the seeming imperative for just climate governing institutions seems to sit idly adrift from the moral world. I try to defend my own such account in the final chapter of this dissertation, which suggests that part of the very reason why individuals have duties to help create such institutions is the very fact that norms of fairness regarding the distribution of the resource are operate pre-institutionally. In doing so, I will complete the process of unifying a number of different theoretical elements pre- and post- institutionally for an adequate account of climate morality within a particular kind of theory of distributive justice.

There are a number of ways of interpreting the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction, but as may already be evident, this way of proceeding which tries for theoretical unity across the pre-institutional and post-institutional divide blurs the distinction between ideal and non- ideal theorizing.25 Such a theory aims at identifying a form of institutional ideal, but not to the exclusion or neglect of focusing on transitional improvements and the processes by which we get there, which I think is a good-making feature in a theory of climate morality that wants to make contact with the world.26

25 For one cataloging of the various ways in which the distinction has been employed, see Valentini, “Ideal vs. Non-ideal Theory: A Conceptual Map.” 26 This echoes something that surfaces in Rawls when he suggests a conceptual link between non-ideal theory and its relation to ideal theory. John Rawls. A Theory of Justice. Revised Edition. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971, 1999), p. 8

Section Five: Historical Continuity

In this final section I want to take a step back to help situate historically the project of laying this preliminary groundwork for a theory of climate morality in the form of a kind of theory of distributive justice, and thereby help prepare us for filling in the groundwork in the next two chapters. The general strategy is intended to be structurally continuous with a long tradition of arguments in the history of political philosophy that share a similar pattern.27

Each of, for instance, Hobbes, Pufendorf, Locke, and Kant as well as a range of contemporary scholars, proceed in their own way to articulate a pressing moral problem that cannot be solved without certain institutions of justice.28 They each have their own particular story about what that moral problem is, why it is generated, what solution it requires in terms of institutional structure, and (at varying degrees of specificity) what constructing the institutions requires of individuals implicated in the moral problem.

For Hobbes, the moral problem is a perpetual state of war. Piggybacking on the theory of human nature and motivation he defends earlier in the Leviathan, it results from our natures as felicity-seeking, death-averse, power seekers, combined with relative scarcity, relative equality and vulnerability, and the pre-institutional lack of authority structures. The

27 Stephen Gardiner seems to recognize this when pushing back against Jamieson’s claim that climate change is so unique and novel. Gardiner thinks this is oversold. Even though he has gone all out to describe the entrenched difficulties of the climate problem (the “perfect moral storm” as he calls it), the basic problem has arisen many times in the past and the basic mechanism for describing a solution is not out of reach nor mysterious. “The general issue… is not new. It has arisen in the past with many social issues, such as the abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement, and the emancipation of women.” (51) While recognizing that this is continuous with a long line of views that take seriously the interplay between the individual and the social, Gardiner only really names the domain of a solution rather than giving an account of what it would actually look like. Gardiner, “Is No One Responsible for Global Environmental Tragedy.” 28 Contemporary theorists like Leif Wenar echo this. See his “Responsibility and Severe Poverty,” in Thomas Pogge (ed.), Freedom From Poverty as a Human Right: Who Owes What to the Very Poor? Co-Published with UNESCO, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

76 solution is a collective laying down of rights and freedoms to be vested in a single sovereign.29

Similarly, Pufendorf sketches a moral problem that arises in the state of nature from our basic interests, our diversity and disagreement, and the fundamental need for assistance from others in achieving them, assistance which is only possible under collective institutions of law and authority.30

Unlike Hobbes, but in agreement with Pufendorf, Locke of course thinks we have robust rights against and duties toward others in the state of nature. The moral problem that he articulates which generates the need for collective institutions is largely the problem of preserving our pre-political rights.31 The enjoyment of our pre-political rights is uncertain.

Though each of us is entitled to enforce the law of nature, on his view, doing so ourselves is at best costly and hard and at worst something we simply do not have the power to do.

Moreover, without clear, settled, established norms and standards for settling controversies we risk spiraling into a state of perpetual war. The solution is to contract together to establish and institute a specific form of government, where we give up our power to punish and enforce the law of nature and some other liberties for the common good of society.

29 See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan in E. Curley, ed., Leviathan, with selected variants from the Latin edition of 1668, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994). 30 Samuel Pufendorf, On the Law of Nature and of Nations in C. Carr, ed., M. Seidler, trans. The Political Writings of Samuel Pufendorf (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). In Book II Chapter 3.15 Pufendof puts it this way, “Man, it is clearly apparent, is an animal most eager to preserve himself, essentially in need, ill-equipped to maintain himself without the aid of those who are like him, and very well suited for the mutual promotion of advantages. All the same, he is often malicious, insolent, easily annoyed, and both ready and able to inflict harm. For this kind of animal to be safe and enjoy the goods that befall his worldly condition, it is necessary that he be sociable.” By “sociable” Pufendorf means a kind of reciprocal advantage and mutual obligation. 31 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, rev. ed., ed. P. Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963). Locke puts, in Bk. II Ch. IX.124, thusly, “The great and chief end, therefore, of men’s uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property. To which in the state of nature there are many things wanting.” To be clear, sometimes Locke uses “property” in a narrow sense indicating physical property and other times in a wider sense to refer to life, liberty, health, and physical property; this is an instance of the latter.

For Kant we see yet another form of this shared structure.32 Like Locke’s moral problem of enforcement, Kant thinks we need to join under the authority of a state in order to enforce various rights. Yet unlike Locke, who thinks that property rights can have more complete specification and moral authority pre-politically, Kant thinks that we also need the state to define various acquired rights, like property, which each of us needs both to realize the value of our innate right to freedom and to know boundaries so as to not violate someone else’s innate rights.

Rawls even seems to acknowledge the force of the preceding points, in some measure, as evidenced by his argument for what he calls the “natural duty of justice”. This duty is thought to require us to “further” or “assist in the establishment of” just arrangements not yet established.33 Rawls calls the duty “natural” to indicate that it does not derive from and is independent and prior to, institutional assignment. In this sense the so called “natural” duty of justice is like other duties of mutual aid or respect or against harm.34

They are moral duties we have simply in virtue of being moral agents—they apply to us generally, as Rawls puts it, “without regard to our voluntary acts”.35 We don’t contract, promise, or consent to natural duties, or acquire them through any other mechanisms that depend on having committed ourselves to them.36

32 Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals (MM). Ed., M. Gregor, trans. M. Gregor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 33 Rawls, A Theory of Justice (RE), p. 99 and 293-4. Officially the duty is a two-part duty that also requires us to comply with just institutions when they exist. When Rawls offers the argument for the natural duty later he puts it this way: “This duty has two parts: first, we are to comply with and to do our fair share in just institutions when they exist and apply to us; second, we are to assist in the establishment of just arrangements when they do not.” But I will focus on the second part, exclusively. 34 Ibid., pp. 98 and 297 where he points to “the duty of helping another when [s]he is in need or jeopardy, provided that one can do so without excessive risk or loss to oneself”, “the duty not to harm or injure another”, “the duty not to cause unnecessary suffering”, and “the duty to show a person respect which is due to him[/her] as a moral being”. 35 Ibid., p. 98. 36 These natural duties are to be distinguished from what Rawls calls “obligations”, which are duties generated by the principle of fairness as it governs the basic structure of society. Obligations, in Rawls’ strict sense,

More recent arguments by Miriam Ronzoni, Laura Valentini, and others address a modern version of this generalized structure regarding the current global order and the injustices it perpetuates with respect to poverty, domination, the erasure of democratic control, etc. They articulate and characterize sets of moral problems that cannot be solved without broader collective institutions (a so-called “global basic structure”) to implement more egalitarian distributive principles.37

The general idea is that practices, behaviors, and interactions of certain kinds in particular domains can raise problematic background conditions, or set up particular moral challenges that “trigger the necessity to reflect on what principles could make our impact on each other’s life mutually justifiable.”38 Individuals might be facing or producing injustice precisely because there is an institutional vacuum without rules, principles, and collective institutions governing behavior—even behavior that may have begun innocuously but with enough repetition and interaction might no longer be so.

I survey the above views because each case is an instance of an argument that there are pre-institutional moral problems that individuals cannot deal with on their own and which require certain kinds of collective institutions in order to deal with the moral problem, and which have normative implications for individuals’ in the pre-institutional setting. I am not hereby agreeing with or endorsing any of the above views in their content or specific inferences from one step to another; whether that be the reality or accuracy in describing the

require a social and political relationship with others (i.e., being bound with others in joint ventures for mutual advantage) and are assigned from within that structure. See ibid., p. 98. 37 Miriam Ronzoni, “The Global Order: A Case of Background Injustice? A Practice-Dependent Account,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 37.3 (2009): 229-256. See especially pages 230 and 243. Laura Valentini, “A Paradigm Shift in Theorizing about Justice? A Critique of Sen,” CSSJ Working Papers Series (2010), p. 9. 38 See Ronzoni, “The Global Order”, 244. Her specific cases are those where some international interactions between states undermine the possibility of a state realizing domestic socioeconomic justice like tax competition or IMF loan conditionalities or WTO trade regulations and escalating tariffs, or agricultural subsidies, etc. See also Shue’s discussion of when scarcity “locks in.” Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection, p. 78, 332.

79 problem, defensibility of the kinds of institutions they would infer, or plausibility of the individual implications they would suggest. What I am trying to take away are the argumentative resources buried in the structure.

Addressing the morality of climate change as a matter for a particular kind of theory of global distributive justice in the way that I have outlined as promising (and which I will build out in the remaining chapters) is a structural companion in this tradition, cut from similar cloth. There is a particular kind of pre-institutional moral problem regarding the overuse, and distribution of use, of AAC (a scarce, valuable, rival, non-excludable global resource that no one owns) which cannot be addressed without particular kinds of institutions. And these facts have multiple normative implications for individuals in the pre-institutional context.

Seeing the structural similarities is instructive toward understand what I am proposing at the outset and helpful to keep in mind as it progresses.

Concluding Remarks

In this chapter I have suggested that in order to develop an adequate account of the morality of climate change, we should pursue a particular kind of theory of global distributive justice. I laid the groundwork for developing such an account by reframing the problem of climate change as a moral problem regarding the overuse of a scarce, valuable, rival, non-excludable global resource that no one owns, AAC. Seeing things this way positions us to understand why developing a theory of distributive justice oriented around AAC is particularly well suited to accomplish the important tasks we saw to be valuable at the end of the last chapter, such as recognizing the importance of collective institutions, capturing the distribution of collective institutional responsibility, and explaining pre-institutional responsibilities and their relationship to collective institutional responsibility. I have

80 suggested that the general strategy is structurally continuous with a long tradition of arguments in the history of political philosophy that share a similar pattern.

In the next two chapters I embark to fill in the essential elements suggested in this groundwork, to realize the promise of a particular kind of theory of global distributive justice as compelling account of climate morality. In particular, in the Chapter Four I defend an account of individual duties regarding the use of ACC. Primarily, that account aims to establish that individuals are required to restrict their use, or benefit from the use, of AAC to within a specified justifiable range, in our present pre-institutional context. But I also argue that it serves as the normative basis for what distributively just global institutions to govern climate change would look like in allocating access to that resource and its benefits. Then in

Chapter Five, drawing on some of those resources I defend an account of the individual duty to participate in the creation of just climate institutions, which I will also refer to as the duty to collectivize.

Distributive Justice and Pre-Institutional Duties Regarding the Use of Atmospheric Absorptive Capacity

Introduction

This chapter begins the task of building out a distinctive theory of global distributive justice that can realize the promise sketched above for developing an adequate account of climate morality. My primary goal regards fairness among distributive shares and is centrally to argue that individuals are, pre-institutionally, bound as a matter of global distributive justice to restrict their use, or benefit from the use, of atmospheric absorptive capacity

(AAC) to within a specified justifiable range.1 With the justification for this in hand, my secondary aim is to suggest that this also serves as the normative basis for what distributively just global institutions to govern climate change would look like in allocating access to, or shares of, that resource and its benefits.

Others in the literature have gestured in vaguely similar directions by offering principles of distribution (usually for emissions).2 Peter Singer, for instance, has defended a form of egalitarianism about greenhouse gas emissions.3 Henry Shue distinguishes between subsistence and luxury emissions, arguing that “emissions should be divided somewhat more equally than they currently are” because it is not fair “to ask some people to surrender necessities so that other people can retain luxuries.”4

1 In the next chapter we’ll see that reducing one’s use of AAC could be part of what constitutes commitment to the end of the creation of just climate institutions and therefore be part of fulfilling one’s duty to participate such creation. I mean here to identify duties in addition to, and with a different structure from, those, even if the satisfaction of both can overlap in behavior. 2 For some broader surveys on various principles scholars have considered see Stephen Gardiner, “Ethics and Global Climate Change,” Ethics, 114.3 (2004): 555-600, Simon Caney, “Just Emissions,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 40 (4) (2012): 255-300, and Darrel Moellendorf “Treaty Norms and Climate Change Mitigation.” 3 Peter Singer, “Ethics and Climate Change: A Commentary on MacCracken, Toman and Gardiner,” Environmental Values 15 (2006): 415-422. 4 Henry Shue, “Subsistence Emissions and Luxury Emissions” in his Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection, pp. 58, 64. Originally Shue argued that everyone was entitled to a certain subsistence emission standard, but has

One striking feature about the inherited literature, however, is the uniformity with which these views fail to clarify the implications of such principles for individuals’ duties, especially in a pre-institutional setting.5 It is genuinely unclear whether they are offering arguments about what our pre-institutional duties are or only offering arguments about how our climate institutions should look (and then perhaps derivatively what our post- institutional duties would be in compliance with them).6

In this chapter I hope to deepen the rationale—in light of our pre-institutional setting and with deliberate orientation toward individual duties—for the kinds of intuitions

Shue and others in the literature correctly signal, but which have been left underexplored and latent.

I approach the task by revisiting, and drawing inspiration from, two prominent models from classical political philosophy for thinking about norms (rights, permissions, limits, etc.) regarding pre-institutional use of unowned resources generally, from Locke and

Kant respectively. To be clear, I am not meaning to defend or endorse either of their overall systems (which rely on premises I do not endorse) nor argue that they offer adequate overall theories of distributive justice. Instead, I highlight them, and use them as a frame of reference to think about the pre-institutional moral problem, to extract specific and plausible

backed away from that position as he realized guaranteeing that could put us over our global budget, so now favors working within that budget first to later establish shares (see p. 7). For a similar view that served as part of Shue’s inspiration see Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain, Global Warming in an Unequal World: A Case of Environmental Colonialism (New Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment, 1991), p. 5. 5 Shue is prone to drape his work in collective language, filling it with “we”, “the affluent”, or “affluent nations” etc. See, e.g., Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection, pp. 49-51, 73, 76, 294, etc. He does recognize the need for an account of the transition and the end goal, p. 56-8, 73. 6 The one real exception to this trend comes from Christian Baatz in a recent, much-discussed article. Baatz, at least, attempts to clarify his position along these dimensions by claiming that “from the moral point of view, even in the absence of institutions, fair shares exist”. Yet even here, in a rare attempt to theorize the pre- and post-institutional distinction, his explanation for why pre-institutional fair shares exist is thin and amounts to little more than the intuition. This is a significant defect in the view. Moreover, as I will argue further in Section Five below, the package of duties that Baatz thinks falls out of this intuition is specified in implausible ways and misguided. Christian Baatz, “Climate Change and Individual Duties to Reduce GHG Emissions,” Ethics, Policy and Environment 17 (1) (2014): 1-19.

83 resources they develop about basic pre-institutional rights, in order to ultimately make way for a preliminary account of distributive shares of AAC and the permissions, rights, and duties that attach to those.7 In the Section One, I consider the Lockean tradition and its focus on fundamental norms and rights of equality and self-preservation and how those can route to a preliminary account of distributive shares and pre-institutional duties. In the

Section Two I turn to the Kantian tradition and its focus on fundamental norms and rights of equality and freedom and how those can route to a preliminary account of distributive shares and pre-institutional duties.8 In Section Three I argue that drawing inspiration from these two views with respect to what absolutely basic pre-institutional rights individuals possess reveals a disjunctive account for why it is plausible to think that individuals have pre- institutional duties to restrict their use of AAC to within a justifiable range, at least as demanding as the less demanding of the two views, and can be morally liable for repair upon violation. Both point in a similar direction regarding distributive pre-institutional shares that is more plausible than skeptics of such pre-institutional duties, who in order to maintain the skepticism of the duties have to deny the basic pre-institutional rights to self-preservation or freedom, which I suggest seem so plausible. This overall picture comes with some fairly radical implications, especially for the well-off. In Section Four I consider how targets of the duties of this purported minimal core, particularly the affluent, might try to temper the implications of this disjunctive account and show why their attempts falter. Then in Section

7 These rights are modest, but in context of AAC use, we will see, make quite a splash. 8 Locke and Kant have their own deeper reasons to accept these distinct foundational rights (e.g., Locke’s theological premises and our duty to God and Kant’s Categorical Imperative). I do not think I have to incorporate their deeper reasons for these foundational pre-institutional rights to gain insight from the way the accounts are conceptualized around a different pre-institutional norm or right of subsistence/freedom (respectively) for moral equals, which plenty of people might have their own intuitive, reasonable, defensible, secular reasons to endorse, even if they aren’t Locke’s or Kant’s. As I will expand upon below, the conception of freedom I ultimately follow may be a departure from Kant’s specific. I do not think, however, it betrays or does too much violence to Kant himself to claim a common lineage.

Five, in light of the preceding arguments about pre-institutional normative determinations, I raise and clarify questions about what this preceding arguments mean for the normative role and authority of just climate institutions.

Section One: The Lockean Model of Norms of Pre-institutional Resource Use

In his Second Treatise of Government John Locke confronts the challenge of showing that property rights can be valid pre-institutionally.9 The following section draws on Locke interpreters Jeremy Waldron and Gopal Sreenivasan to show how the Lockean employment of fundamental norms of equality and self-preservation generate rights to resources pre- institutionally that can serve as a minimal ground for sorting out fair distributive shares and restrictions on AAC use.10

Locke thinks, plausibly, that we have a basic right to self-preservation.11 He comes to this through his theological commitments, thinking it is because we are “sent into the World by [God’s] order and about [God’s] business”.12 For Locke, God created us and gave the world to us in common for “the support and comfort” of our being.13 His clearest statement for why this furnishes us with a right to self-preservation comes from the First Treatise:

“God having made Man, and planted in him, as in all other Animals, a strong desire of Self-preservation, and furnished the World with things fit for Food and Rayment and other Necessaries of Life, subservient to his design, that Man should live and abide for sometime upon the Face of the Earth, and not that so curious and wonderful a piece of Workmanship by its own Negligence, or want of Necessaries, should perish again, presently after a few moments continuance: God, I say, having made Man and the World thus, spoke to him, (that is) directed him by his Senses and Reason . . . to the use of those things, which were serviceable for his Subsistence,

9 Locke, Two Treatises of Government. From here on I will refer to the first treatise as 1T and the second treatise as 2T and refer to paragraph numbers. 10 Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations of John Locke's Political Thought (GLE), (Cambridge University Press, 2002), see especially ch. 6. Gopal Sreenivasan, The Limits of Lockean Rights in Property (LLR), (Oxford University Press, 1995). 11 In fact, in virtue of his theological commitments explored below, he thinks this is both a right and a duty, as he claims “Every one… is bound to preserve himself, and not to quit his Station wilfully” (2T 6). As I said above, I do not think we have to follow Locke’s premises here, given that a pre-institutional right to self-preservation is independently plausible. 12 2T 6. 13 Regarding Locke’s view on original communism see 2T 25-6.

and given him as means of his Preservation . . . And thus Man’s Property in the Creatures, was founded upon the right he had, to make use of those things, that were necessary or useful to his Being.”14

This source of normativity provides the basis for norms of pre-institutional resource use. It does so particularly when combined with Locke’s claim that we are all fundamentally moral equals.15 No one has superior moral status. We are all on a par. So unlike Hobbes’s egoism, which in Waldron’s words “treats P’s survival as a sui generis source of normativity for P, something which is normatively quite opaque to Q, and it treats Q’s interest as a sui generis source of normativity for Q, which is normatively quite opaque to P,” Locke recognizes that the source of normativity of self-preservation in my case, your case, and all cases is the same.16 This key aspect seems plausible, even if we balk at Locke’s religious justification for the right to self-preservation.

Combining the points about self-preservation with the claim of fundamental equality provides Locke with a basic normative scheme. Everyone has a right to self-preservation.

Each also, given this theological commitments, has a duty of self-preservation.17 And because of the identical source of normativity for all regarding rights to self-preservation,

Locke also thinks that, other things being equal (i.e., when one’s “own preservation comes not in competition”) everyone is bound to preserve “the rest of Mankind”.18 As Sreenivasan interprets this, he distinguishes between everyone’s “natural right to preservation” and their natural right “to preserve themselves”. We can distinguish these by inquiring into the duty

14 1T 86. 15 As Waldron has argued forcefully, this position about equality is also held on strictly theological grounds. Regarding Locke’s view on equality see 2T 4 and 123. See also Waldron GLE, p. 6. 16 Waldron, GLE, p. 157-8. This doesn’t mean that pre-institutionally resource use has to be strictly egalitarian, for Locke. In fact, as Waldron highlights, part of the very goal of the Second Treatise is to justify some “disproportionate and unequal” distribution. But it does provide the basis for constraining possible resource use. See 2T 50 and Waldron, GLE, p. 152. 17 I do not think we need to agree to this duty of self-preservation in order for the account to have implications for AAC use, rights to self-preservation alone suffice. 18 Locke, 2T 6.

86 each right imposes on others, both of which are essentially negative duties. As Sreenivasan puts it,

“In the former case, others have a duty to refrain from directly endangering the life of the rights-bearer; in the latter case, others have a duty to refrain from impeding the rights-bearer from actively preserving herself.”19

The way we exercise and make meaningful such rights is by using natural resources. These are the means of our self-preservation. So the right of self-preservation ultimately refers to one’s share of the means necessary for one’s self-preservation. It is a right of access to such resources, without being denied or facing undue burden, which will be key to thinking about pre-institutional distributive resource shares.20 Given such rights, Locke thinks there must be legitimate ways for individuals to appropriate resources for rightful private use and benefit that were previously unowned without requiring, for instance, everybody’s consent or approval by some political body.21 With an eye to this, Locke, of course, puts significant focus on our labor, which is necessary generally to realize the value of Earth’s resources. It is controversial among scholars exactly why, for Locke, labor confers property.22 I cannot settle these controversies here, but I will present one interpretation, with an eye toward showing that at least the following minimal form of labor acquisition confers rights to resources. As

Waldron puts it, for Locke, the significance of our labor is that, given the teleology of resources described above, it is “the appropriate mode of our participation in the creation

19 Sreenivasan, LLR, 24. When we pull in Locke’s complicated position on charity, we see a more positive component of the duty as those with surpluses can be required to provide active provision of resources to prevent the supreme want of others. See Waldron GLE, pp. 177-85. 20 Ibid., p. 43. 21 Sreenivasan calls this the “consent problem” and sees it as Locke’s central task to solve. As Locke says, “The Earth, and all that is therein, is given to Men for the Support and Comfort of their being. And tho’ all the Fruits it naturally produces, and Beasts it feeds, belong to Mankind in common, as they are produced by the spontaneous hand of Nature…yet being given for the use of Men, there must of necessity be a means to appropriate them some way or other, before they can be of any use, or at all beneficial to any particular Man” (2T 26). 22 See, e.g., Sreenivasan LLR, ch. 3, and Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 174.

87 and sustenance of our being.”23 Or as Sreenivasan puts it, “property in labour’s product may be seen as the actualization of a prior right to the means of self-preservation.”24 When placed within the rest of the framework we have offered so far, Locke is in a position to show the constraints of legitimate resource appropriation by labor. Importantly these constraints operate pre- and post-institutionally. These take the shape of Locke’s so called spoilage and sufficiency limitations, and his doctrine of charity

The spoilage limitation comes from Locke’s claim that “Nothing was made by God for Man to spoil or destroy”.25 Waldron thinks this is best understood as a way of condemning acquisitions that “perish uselessly” in the possession of the acquirer. As he puts it,

“For everyone to be denied the use of them by someone who has no use for them himself, or does not propose to put them to human use, is a direct affront to the teleological relation in which each of us stands to the bounty provided by God.”26

While this norm can govern individual behavior, it does not alone constrain individual resource use or serve to condemn inequality too significantly, given the advent of money and market economies, where one can accumulate land indefinitely and exchange resource use for money, which doesn’t spoil.27

The sufficiency limitation owes itself to Locke’s claim about resource use being legitimate “at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others”.28

23 Waldron, GLE, p. 164. 24 Sreenivasan, LLR, p. 41. 25 Locke, 2T 31. 26 Waldron, GLE, p. 170. 27 See 2T 46. If someone “bartered away Plumbs, that would have rotted in a Week, for Nuts that would last good for his eating a whole Year, he did no injury; he wasted not the common Stock; destroyed no part of the portion of Goods that belonged to others, so long as nothing perished uselessly in his hands”. The proviso could still significantly criticize waste in market economies. 28 Locke, 2T 27.

Waldron understands this as a sufficient, rather than necessary, condition on the legitimacy of resource use,

“highlighting the point that there is certainly no difficulty with unilateral acquisition…in circumstances of plenty but leaving open the possibility that some other basis might have to be found to regulate acquisition in circumstances of scarcity.”29

In circumstances of plenty, as far as the rights of others are concerned, one’s use does as good as taking nothing from the unowned resources and so can be legitimately used without their consent.30 When resources become scarcer, the possibility of prejudice to others’ rights, particularly rights to the means of self-preservation, becomes more salient as do avenues to lodge complaints about the legitimacy of use.31 Resource use violates rights to the means of self-preservation when one’s use isn’t in service of one’s own self-preservation, but which could be used by others whose self-preservation is under threat.32 On this reading, the sufficiency limitation functions to “ensure that the material preconditions of everyone’s right to the means of preservation remain firmly in place.”33 Sreenivasan’s use of terms like

“ensure” and “firmly in place” are worth noting, because they highlight an emphasis on the notions of stability and security of self-preservation indicated by the view. Early in Locke’s

Treatise, the values of security and stability are rampant in justifying the move from the state of nature to civil society governed by the rule of law.34 We can see a similar motivation in

Locke’s response to Hobbes, when he worries that accepting a Hobbesian Leviathan would

29 Waldron, GLE, p. 172. In conditions of scarcity, where not everyone’s rights to self-preservation can be met, it certainly cannot be the case that no use is legitimate, which is one of the reasons why Waldron doesn’t want to read the condition as a necessary condition on legitimate use. I will flag here that while AAC is scarce, it is not so scarce as to undermine anyone’s rights to self-preservation. 30 Sreenivasan, LLR, p. 48. 31 Waldron, GLE, p. 172. 32 Sreenivasan, LLR, p. 49. 33 Ibid. 34 See 2T Chs. 1-4. Locke’s concerns about being subject to, rather than free from, arbitrary power in the slavery chapter are telling.

89 not provide the right kind of stable and secure protection against known threats. To accept such a bargain would be for people to “take care to avoid what mischiefs can be done them by polecats and foxes” but be “content, nay, think it safety, to be devoured by lions.”35 More than mere self-preservation, the right Locke seems to be concerned with points to protections against being subject to constant threats to survival, where the rug could be pulled out at any time by significant and arbitrary powers.36

The final norm Locke employs to constrain resource use by labor operates through his account of charity. Locke’s view of charity is however very unlike contemporary views, which see it either as supererogatory or perhaps as a duty without a corresponding right.

Instead, while called a view of “charity”, Locke’s view smacks of a component of a theory of distributive justice. As Waldron puts it, the view

“requires property-owners in every economy to cede control of some of their surplus possessions, so that they can be used to satisfy the pressing needs of the very poor, when the latter have no way of surviving otherwise.”37

Locke speaks of such needy individuals having “a right” and “a title” to such surpluses. It is wrong for individuals to withhold such surpluses and they cannot be said to be exercising their property rights. Waldron even makes the case that Locke thought this form of charity

35 2T 93. 36 This view has important resonance with the contemporary human rights literature. While of course we cannot protect against all dangers, Henry Shue has described protections needed against “standard threats” and Charles Beitz speaks of the purpose of human rights as being “to protect urgent individual interests against certain predictable dangers…to which they are vulnerable under typical circumstances of life in a modern world order. See Shue, Basic Rights, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 29 and Beitz, The Idea of Human Rights, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 109. James Nickel, likewise, thinks of human rights as being important because they track vital human interests which we need secure claims, nothing less than a right with its pre-emptive moral weight and restrictiveness, to protect. Making Sense of Human Rights, 2nd Ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), esp. pp. 55-6, 76-7. 37 Waldron, GLE, p. 177. In the First Treatise Locke says “God the Lord and Father of all, has given no one of his Children such a Property, in his peculiar Portion of the things of this World, but that he has given his needy Brother a Right to the Surplusage of his Goods; so that it cannot justly be denyed him, when his pressing Wants call for it. As Justice gives every Man a Title to the product of his honest Industry, and the fair Acquisitions of his Ancestors descended to him; so Charity gives every Man a Title to so much out of another’s Plenty, as will keep him from extream want, where he has no means to subsist otherwise.” (1T 42).

90 could be enforced by a state, and that neither the wealthy nor civil society could stand in the way and resist efforts by the poor to seize such surpluses.38 The qualification of having no other means of survival is important, however, because it applies only to those who cannot subsist through their own labor (which, remember, is the “appropriate mode” of producing our subsistence), and reveals that the general way to relieve poverty involves restructuring the economy to secure meaningful employment for all who can.39

There, in outline, is the Lockean model for pre-institutional resource use.40 Of course, Locke’s account is thoroughly reliant on theological premises and so we might be skeptical that it can be helpful in our current context regarding climate change and AAC. I follow Sreenivasan in thinking that

“despite the fact that Locke himself made a fundamental appeal to theological premises, the adoption of a secular outlook does not in the least diminish the contemporary relevance of the Lockean argument for private property.”41

This is centrally true because we can make good secular sense of fundamental moral equality among persons and basic rights to self-preservation of the kind employed by the Lockean model, which have implications for legitimate pre-institutional distributive shares and resource use, and do so without requiring the religious teleology of resources.

However, before more completely linking the resources we can pull from Lockean model with climate change and pre-institutional AAC use, in the next section I present the

Kantian model of pre-institutional resource use. Both views point in a similar direction toward the existence of some form of fairness in distributive shares and a determinate core of pre-institutional restrictions on AAC use, as a moral minimum. Either view is more

38 Waldron, GLE, pp. 182 and 185. Waldron puts it nicely when he says that the prospect of starvation “short- circuits” complaints about the legitimacy of resource use without consent (p. 186). Much more could be said regarding the implications of this view for resistance to injustice than I can here. 39 See Sreenivasan, LLR, p. 42-3. 40 And indeed it pays dividends post-institutionally, as well. 41 Sreenivasan, LLR, p. 6.

91 plausible than alternatives which are skeptical of the existence of such duties, because the fundamental rights they trace are so independently plausible, so the more important controversy is determining whether the moral minimum is where the Lockean places it or where the Kantian does.

Section Two: The Kantian Model of Norms of Pre-institutional Resource Use

So we have, in the Lockean tradition, a view wherein pre-institutional distributive shares and norms regarding use of unowned resources are determinate and normatively authoritative in light of our moral equality and rights to self-preservation. In this section I look at a second model for thinking about these norms, which draws its inspiration from the

Kantian tradition and which takes moral equality and rights to freedom as the grounding mechanisms.42 As a reminder, I am not trying to offer a defense of Kant’s view, as such, or rely on all of its components, but instead to highlight an alternative model for thinking through specifically pre-institutional norms; to extract specific and plausible resources the tradition seeds and develops about distinct basic pre-institutional rights, in order to ultimately make way for a preliminary account of distributive shares of AAC and the permissions, rights, and duties that attach to those.43

42 I should note here that in defense of his version of philosophical anarchism, and critique of the possibility of state authority, A John Simmons’ heterodox interpretation of the Lockean position is closer to the following Kantian position by extending the grounding norms beyond self-preservation or survival to freedom and self- government. See Simmons’s Justification and Legitimacy (JL) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) and his The Lockean Theory of Rights (LTR) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). Simmons’ “Lockean” position begins with a natural right to free self-government or independence. This corresponds to a duty to respect the same right in others by not harming their “lives, liberty, and property” (JL, p. 138). Like the Kantian, Simmons’s Locke agrees that “property is an indispensable condition of self-government. Property does not…just insure survival; it is also the security for our freedom, protecting us against dependence on the will of others and the subservience to them that this creates” (LTR p. 274). In order to secure our freedom in this way, Simmons thinks that we are entitled to use up to a “fair share” of the earth’s resources. He interprets a “fair share” as “a portion of the earth’s resources as large and as good as the best share that could simultaneously be privately held by everyone with a right to appropriate” (LTR, p. 281). Within our fair share, the thought goes, we have a right not to be interfered with, and through our use, others’ natural rights are not interfered with. This overreaches with respect to interpreting Locke in a way the account I developed above doesn’t. 43 I think there can be legitimate disagreement about how extensive pre-institutional rights are between the Lockean inspired resources and the Kantian inspired resources.

From the bottom up, Kant’s view starts with everyone’s basic right of freedom, a version of which is the central resource I aim to draw on in distinction with the Lockean inspired resources detailed above. This right is often interpreted, at its root, as independence from being constrained by another’s choice.44 Of course, as stated this is too broad to be meaningful. Given that rights to freedom are reciprocal and, of necessity, mutually held by all, we can indeed be constrained by the choices of others.45 As Tom Hill helpfully puts it, rights to freedom are limited by “principles of justice, noninjury, contract, and responsibility to others.”46 The basic right of freedom is meant to protect, as Hill puts it, “certain decisions that deeply affect [a] person’s own life, so long as they are consistent with other basic moral principles, including recognition of comparable liberties for others.”47 The important moral value of such protection is in being able to pursue a range of desires, interests, and projects in a way that can be construed as us making our own lives.48 Having such protection is to be able to live a moderately self-determining life with its own shape that isn’t subject to the domination of others. For the rest of this chapter I will take the key aspect of this basic right to freedom to rest in its commitment to and guarantee of what I will call a certain threshold sphere of effective agency.49 If Kant ultimately intended a different or thinner, perhaps noumenal,

44 See Kant, GW 4:446-7. 45 Kant, MM 6:238. The equal basic right to freedom generates, for Kant, rights to bodily integrity, equality, as well as things like freedom of thought and speech. One might try to consider how adjusting one’s conception of “freedom” (e.g., as noninterference, as non-domination, or as something more robust like self-control, self- mastery, or possession of capabilities required for the full development of human personality) could have implications for climate duties down the line. I won’t say much here about this area of inquiry because I suspect the only differences show up in circumstances of plenty, but in circumstances of significant scarcity any theoretical differences likely fall away. For explorations of models of freedom see, e.g., Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 46 Thomas Hill, Autonomy and Self-Respect, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 48. 47 Ibid. 48 I borrow this language from Barbara Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 178. 49 This borrows from James Griffin’s account of the justification of human rights in Chapter 2 of his book On Human Rights, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), see esp. pp. 33-6.

93 notion of freedom that could be had by the Stoic tortured on the rack, then I am importantly departing from Kant himself, while exploring some of the resources that may come with a view that places norms of equality and rights of freedom as effective agency (rather than mere self-preservation) in a pre-institutional setting and what that might mean for distributive shares of resources and associated permissions, rights, and duties.

In order to actually be free in this sense of having protection for effective agency, we must act and pursue ends in the world. We need physical means to carry out our projects.

We need a sphere of freedom, manifested in external objects, that is normatively (and empirically) protected from the interferences of others. But unlike, for instance, the right to bodily integrity, we cannot simply point to our bodies to explain intuitively what it is that others cannot encroach upon. Meaningful and effective agency in the world requires things external to ourselves to use, which need to be acquired.50 Eventually, Kant thinks that this will require the state, which is in some ways the central reason why he argues we need to leave the state of nature, and why I argue that we have duties to participate in the creation of institutions of climate justice.51

But in advance of that, Kant thinks that when we combine our right to freedom as effective agency with the claim that it is necessary to use external objects to make meaningful

50 Kant, MM 6:248. Kant also here generates rights and claims of contract and role-based statuses. 51 This is what leads Kant to say things like “The doctrine of right wants to be sure that what belongs to each has been determined (with mathematical exactitude)”, which requires the existence of just institutions (Kant, MM, 6:233). As Anna Stilz nicely puts it, “any system of property will require the existence of a set of rules that is complex and to some extent conventional: rules about what sorts of things are eligible to be held as private property, what precisely are the conditions defining voluntary exchange, what constitutes an exploitative agreement, what are the conditions of publicly recognized spousal or parental rights, and how to distribute opportunities, education, and income. The conditions specifying these sorts of rights would be imprecise and difficult to judge in a state of nature.” Stilz, Liberal Loyalty: Freedom, Obligation, and the State, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 40. I agree that meeting this standard requires the existence of just institutions, but that does not mean that pre-institutionally we are wholly in the dark. Lacking perfect determination and normative authority does not mean that there is no determination and authority.

94 that freedom as we pursue our projects, a series of derivative rights can be generated. These derivative rights Kant calls, rights to “empirical possession” and “intelligible possession”.

The former (rights to “empirical possession”) are the kinds of rights that allow us to condemn someone for, say, taking away the apple I am holding just before I bite into it or the shirt from off my back. In cases when we are literally in physical possession of some object that we are trying to put to use to meaningfully express our agential freedom, Kant thinks we can make sense of the claim that others do not take it from us—he thinks we can do this in roughly the same way we can when we point to our bodies and make claims against others not to violate them.

But simple rights to “empirical possession” as outlined are obviously not sufficient to secure our effective agential freedom with respect to external objects. We need more than mere protection against violation of objects we are currently in possession of. We need some assurance, to pursue most of our ends, that when we place objects down they are still part of our rightful sphere, which others cannot encroach upon. Because of this, Kant introduces another kind of right he thinks we have; rights to “intelligible possession”.52 These are the kinds of rights that allow us to condemn someone for taking the apple I was going to eat while I step away to the bathroom, or taking my shirt from my laundry hamper. Recognizing rights to such things, even if we are not currently possessing them, is hugely important for securing a sphere of effective agency. Given that unilaterally using resources takes them from the common stock and thus makes them unavailable to others (in both the empirical sense that they cannot make use of it and in the normative sense that they would have a new

52 The idea is that even if we do not literally, physically (empirically) have the object in possession, we can (intelligibly) understand its normative status as part of our rightful sphere.

95 obligation to respect my acquisition), any intelligible possession potentially limits the freedom of others, each of whom also have equal basic rights to freedom.

Kant makes sense of this by considering conditions on resource use, claiming that

“something external can be originally acquired only in conformity with the idea of a civil condition, that is, with a view to it and to its being brought about, but prior to its realization”53 Some attempts to use things, or claim some pre-institutional distributive share, are going to be ruled out by this, because they couldn’t reasonably survive ratification through institutions as we approach a “civil condition”.54 That is, some distributive schema obviously violate a notion of equal freedom and mutual protection of spheres of effective agency, and with it they violate notions of fairness and mutual justifiability. Anna Stilz provides a helpful reading of what this amounts to for Kant:

“For my possession of this particular object or piece of land to genuinely impose an obligation on others to recognize and respect it, it has to be something that they could agree to, viewed as free and independent individuals who also have a similar interest in holding property. And in order for them to be able to agree, my holdings cannot infringe their human right to independence: for if a regime of external property jeopardized this right, then their hypothetical consent would be impossible to obtain. This means two things: first, that my property rightfully extends only to a “fair share,” one that is consistent with others’ exercising a similar right. And second, I am reciprocally bound to recognize others’ property once I have appropriated my own, for otherwise I would dominate them by forcing them to recognize a right in me that I am not prepared to grant others. My property rights, in sum, must be justifiable to others as free and independent persons if they are to impose valid obligations.”55

53 Kant, MM, 6:264. 54 One might be curious because of something Kant says in Theory and Practice (AK 8:291-2). “But this thorough equality of persons as the subjects of a state is quite consistent with the greatest inequality in the quantity and degree of their possessions, whether these be physical or mental superiority, external gifts of fortune, or simply rights (of which there can be many) with respects to others.” In context it seems clear that Kant’s claim is just about equal standing, or equal moral status, as in the idea that each has the standing to coerce property rights, even though some are poor, powerless, destitute, etc. I do not actually think it is a claim about such a distribution being just, fair, or consistent with their dignity or status as agents. Immanuel Kant, On the Old Saw: That May be Right in Theory But It Won’t Work in Practice, (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). 55 Stilz, Liberal Loyalty, p. 43-4. One way to interpret what a “fair share” consists in actually comes from Simmons’ heterodox reading of Locke in the footnote above; as “a portion of the earth’s resources as large and

These conditions are especially important because Kant thinks that property rights come with a right to use, individually, coercion against interference to protect such property in defense of our external freedom.56 Claiming a certain authority to use pre-institutional resources (with obligations that others not interfere and rights to defend against such interference) without reciprocally recognizing others’ rights to use by limiting one’s own use is a form of domination. It is a way of disrespecting the rights to freedom as effective agency of others.

Section Three: Locke, Kant, and AAC

We have now seen two distinct models for starting to think about pre-institutional distributive shares and their connected norms (rights, permissions, limits, etc.) regarding an individual’s pre-institutional use of unowned resources. Both appeal to norms of equality to generate their schema, but while the Lockean inspired picture pairs equality with rights to what is necessary for secure and stable self-preservation the Kantian inspired picture combines equality with what is necessary to secure rights to meaningful freedom, interpreted as a sphere of effective agency.57 Each view is a general view about resources, but given the particular structure and function that AAC plays, as our resource of interest in the context of climate change, each view has implications that indicate the existence of a determinate core of pre-institutional restrictions on AAC use, as a moral minimum. Addressing the implications from drawing on the Lockean inspired resources and Kantian inspired resources, in turn, I argue here that since either view is more plausible as a moral minimum

as good as the best share that could simultaneously be privately held by everyone with a right to appropriate”. Simmons, LTR, p. 281. 56 Kant, MM, 6:233. He says that “if a certain use of freedom is itself a hindrance to freedom in accordance with universal law, coercion that is opposed to this hindrance…is right” (6:232). While I cannot discuss the matter here, this point is an important consideration when thinking through rights and permissions for resistance in our pre-institutional climate change context. 57 From here on, when I refer to the “Lockean” or “Kantian” I am speaking of someone who draws on the specific resources I have extracted, not someone who endorses Locke’s or Kant’s entire system.

97 than alternatives which are altogether skeptical of the existence of such duties, because the fundamental rights they trace are so plausible, we have a disjunctive argument for pre- institutional distributive shares that respect those rights and thereby for the existence of pre- institutional duties to restrict AAC use. As such, I take the more important theoretical controversy is determining whether the moral minimum is where the Lockean inspired view would place it or where the Kantian inspired one would, and what it means for others when some individuals are falling below that minimum entitlement, in order to establish how demanding such duties are. The Kantian inspired picture seems to presuppose the necessity of the assurance of the requirements for secure and stable self-preservation, but might extend significantly further depending on how much more Kantian freedom, as effective agency, requires by way of material goods.58 From one angle this may appear to make the

Kantian inspired picture more demanding because it requires that others are owed a higher standard. From another angle, however, it also has the prospect of protecting more of our own resources use. In the end, I hope to show that in our empirical context with respect to climate change, these differences do not amount to much.

Implications of the Lockean Account

Recall that for the Lockean one is only licensed to use surplus resources when certain conditions are met. If those conditions are not met, then the resource use is not licensed because it constitutes a violation of a negative duty owed to others against interference with their rights. In particular, the Lockean view issues restrictions on surplus resource use when such use competes with the secure and stable self-preservation of others. As long as others are secure in their capacities for self-preservation, as a conception of pre-institutional justice

58 On thin or minimalist interpretations of freedom the difference between the Kantian and Lockean might be negligible. On thicker more inclusive conceptions of freedom, the gap between the views might be more expansive.

98 and distributive shares, the Lockean view tolerates significant inequalities.59 Yet as soon as the inequalities place some above and others below a threshold of secure self-preservation, where the surplus competes with the deprivation, the normative mechanisms of the Lockean style view go to work.

Locke himself, appropriately indexed to his era, was largely concerned with land as a resource. Owning and working land was the quintessential way of securing one’s self- preservation. The modern world is very different from Locke’s world. Owning and working land is not the generalizable way of securing self-preservation. And yet, Locke’s theory is built around a basic norm that allows it to carry implications through malleable empirical circumstances. In the modern world, use of AAC itself functions similarly to land ownership in Locke’s time. Using AAC is the quintessential way of securing the conditions for self- preservation. This is not a necessary fact (indeed, it better not be!) but contingently, empirically, security in self-preservation is closely associated with AAC use.

In the modern world, furthermore, billions of people lack the conditions for secure self-preservation, which would be alleviated with more access to AAC use. We know that countless others of us use AAC for much beyond self-preservation. Furthermore, we know that there is a very tight global constraint on AAC use altogether. And lastly we know, as we have already seen in characterizing AAC as a scarce global common pool resource, unlike many other resources, use in one corner does actually compete with everyone around the globe (and many of those into the future).60 As these elements come together they indicate

59 Though, remember back to the quote about foxes, polecats, and lions. Certain inequalities in resource holdings can risk upsetting the security and stability of self-preservation because of the asymmetry of power and threat of domination. 60 This is very unlike a circumstance in which I, say, waste a potato from my garden. Given empirical constraints, even if someone is starving in South Sudan, that potato couldn’t have reasonably been put toward their self-preservation. If we are collectively are within the AAC budget, if I take some, while others could still take some AAC, of the total budget there’s some portion or percent less that is available, even if there is still some. If we are already outside the AAC budget, the one’s emissions amount to use of atmospheric space

99 that the conditions which license one to use surplus AAC are not met, which in turn recommends pre-institutional restrictions on using AAC for the modern Lockean.

At first glance, one might think that in such circumstances of scarcity the Lockean inspired view points to a restriction on entitlements to AAC use beyond one’s own self- preservation, until the self-preservation of others is secure. To do otherwise would be seen as violating one’s negative duty to not interfere with the self-preservation of others. While this would certainly satisfy the Lockean provisos, and avoid wrongdoing, the full view is slightly more complicated.

When Locke discussed land, he was careful to make clear that meeting the conditions for licensed use (i.e., abiding by the provisos) didn’t necessarily mean that land use was illegitimate unless everybody had a plot they could work for their self-preservation.61 Locke’s own position then wasn’t then a right of each to use and own land, per se. One individual could have used and owned massive portions of land, employed people on it with a living wage, and not thereby threatened their rights to the stable conditions for their self- preservation, even though they were prevented from owning a share of land.62

If we take that lesson to the modern context, we will see why the Lockean inspired position shouldn’t be understood as right to or restriction on, AAC use, per se and can take on the lessons of Pareto efficiency. Just like the person who used disproportionately large tracts of land thereby preventing others from owning it, but employed others on it with a living wage, it is possible that an individual’s massive use of AAC could support or expand the secure self-preservation of others who were thereby prevented from using the AAC

beyond capacity, a kind of debt or excess use, which heightens the scrutiny that such use be put toward fundamental rights. 61 Sreenivasan, LLR, p. 39. 62 Ibid., p. 51. In Sreenivasan’s hands this means that the land must be able to sustain at least as many people as if it were left unused, p. 55.

100 themselves. The fundamental operative norm for the Lockean is secure and stable self- preservation, and the actual distribution of AAC use is merely an important means of realizing that norm. Inequalities in AAC use only become problematic when they undercut that norm.63

However, this should not comfort the status quo because most of us have clearly undercut that norm. What the above paragraphs tells us is that as long as some are not secure in their self-preservation one must either restrict AAC use to only what supports one’s secure self-preservation or use any AAC beyond that to support the self-preservation of as many individuals as it could have supported were it left to them.64 It is clear that our conditions are such that some are not secure in their self-preservation. If we look at any plausible measurement of development or the kinds of things we might investigate to assess how norms of secure self-preservation stack up, billions of people worldwide fall below that threshold. It is equally clear that most of the global affluent meet neither of the two disjuncts that would make permissible their

AAC use for the Lockean in a context where others are not secure in their self-preservation.

They use more AAC than supports their secure self-preservation. But it is also not plausible

63 All those years ago, this is essentially the lesson to be taken away from more recent debates between capabilities and resourcists views of justice generally, simply with different target norms (self-preservation v. effective agential capabilities). Equal distribution of resources can unfairly burden those who, through arbitrary reasons, require more resources to achieve the same capabilities. See for instance Ronald Dworkin, “What Is Equality? Part 1: Equality of Welfare”, Philosophy and Public Affairs 10 (3) (1981):185-246, Ronald Dworkin, “What Is Equality? Part 2: Equality of Resources”, Philosophy and Public Affairs 10 (4) (1981): 283 – 345, Richard Arneson, “Equality and Equal Opportunity for Welfare”, Philosophical Studies 56 (1) (1989):77 – 93, Thomas Pogge, “A Critique of the Capabilities Approach” in Harry Brighouse and Ingrid Robeyns, eds., Measuring Justice: Primary Goods and Capabilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 17-60, Madison Powers and Ruth Faden, “Health Capabilities, Outcomes, and the Political Ends of Justice”, Journal of Human Development and Capabilities 12 (4) (2011), Martha Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009). In the climate literature specifically, see Eric Neumayer’s work on how matters as simple as geography can affect emissions needs, “National Carbon Dioxide Emissions: Geography Matters” Area, 36.1 (2004), pp. 33-40. 64 This is importantly different than, for instance, Singer’s position in “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” because it places no restriction on wealth accumulated outside the AAC use economy (through renewable energy or if compensated by carbon sinks), which would not violate the Lockean non-interference duty on the means of subsistence. But within the AAC use economy, this is likely in the range of only being entitled to retain the benefit of, given population estimates and total AAC use budget restrictions, at most a few metric tons of CO2 per person per year as opposed to about 17 tons of CO2 for the average American.

101 for them to claim that the benefit from their AAC use above that threshold is justifiably distributed to support the self-preservation of others thereby prevented from using the AAC

(unlike the employer landowner). And because of that, the Lockean inspired view, which is concerned with equal fundamental pre-institutional rights to self-preservation in order to account for a preliminary picture of fair pre-institutional distributive shares, speaks with loud implications, condemning most of our AAC use as wrongful and in violation of the rights of those below the self-preservation threshold.

Before I move on to discuss the Kantian account and compare the two, I want to suggest that the above elements of the Lockean inspired view allow it to avoid a potential worry that has been lodged at others, like Peter Singer, for focusing too much on GHG emissions directly and not recognizing that distributive justice takes place in a broader context.65 The Lockean view, as I have presented it, does widen our lens past exclusive attention in isolation to GHGs (or AAC, as it were) to focus on a full bundle of resources for what is necessary to support secure self-preservation. It is sensitive to historical contingency, and empirical variation depending on looming threats and available resources.

However, just the same, those contingencies are precisely what allows us to say that, until there is some radical change in empirical context like a massive technological innovation or radical population shift, there is something at a global scale unique about AAC and requires us to be concerned with the overuse of a scarce, valuable, rival, non-excludable global resource that no one owns and how it interfaces with basic access to secure and stable self-preservation. Unlike distributing a bushel of apples, which can be exploited and merely disappear for future use and benefit and then be replaced by pears or oranges, AAC is a resource that when over-

65 David Miller, for instance, makes this point in his Tanner Lectures, “Global Justice and Climate Change: How Should Responsibilities Be Distributed?” in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values Vol. 28, ed. Grethe B. Peterson (Salt Lake City, UT: The University of Utah Press, 2009), see esp. pp. 141-2.

102 exploited at scale doesn’t just disappear for future use and benefit, it brings a legacy of climatic disruption thereby undermining future substitution strategies. For all of the reasons sketched in Chapter Three, this is why AAC use has to be managed and deserves its centerpiece in the theory, even if the Lockean inspired view can and should agree secure and stable self-preservation takes place within a broader network of resources.

Implications of the Kantian Account

Let me step back to briefly discuss the implications of the Kantian inspired account from a preliminary, pre-institutional, account of distributive shares of AAC and their attending pre-institutional restrictions on AAC use, as we begin to bring the two into conversation. The Kantian inspired view I am concerned with, remember, is concerned with rights to freedom protecting a sphere of effective agency, not simply rights protecting secure and stable self-preservation.

While we recognized that the Lockean can be sensitive to some inequalities that threaten the security and stability of self-preservation precisely because of the asymmetry of power that certain forms of inequality in resource holdings generate and the possible resulting threat of domination, it is plausible that the Kantian inspired account which highlights effective agency (as I’ve understood it following Griffin) as its fundamental pre- institutional right is less tolerant of inequalities. The threat of domination or disruption to a sphere of effective agency appears before the threat of domination or disruption to secure and stable self-preservation. So while the Lockean style view might be able to tolerate relatively significant pre-institutional inequality while keeping everybody above the threshold

103 for secure and stable self-preservation, it is much more likely that such inequality could disturb the Kantian style view’s aim of mutually attainable effective agency for all.66

Derivative on that broader aim, the Kantian inspired view will come to govern AAC use given its close association with—beyond mere survival—all aspects of people’s freedom to set ends and pursue their projects. Just as the Lockean inspired view can point to the countless masses who lack secure self-preservation, which would be alleviated with greater access to AAC, the Kantian will see that the broader aim of mutually attainable freedom as effective agency is quite clearly disrupted by contemporary distributions of AAC use, and in virtue of that, some individuals must have outstripped their fair share entitlements.

Like the Lockean inspired view does for its basic norm of self-preservation, the

Kantian takes justification with respect to its norm of freedom as effective agency in a larger context than simply AAC use, even though it is the scarce resource that triggers pre- institutional norms of justice so as to not upset equality of freedom. So a Kantian fair distributive share of pre-institutional resources need not mean maximal equal rights to AAC use and can similarly take on the lessons of Pareto efficiency.67 Some may require, for all manner of reasons, more or less actual AAC to be able to effectively express their agency and pursue their projects.68 But like the Lockean regarding self-preservation, if one uses a

66 Part of this is because the Kantian position is deliberately constrained with an eye toward a “civil condition” and what could be ratified through institutions. For reasons Elizabeth Anderson has importantly investigated, inequalities within democratic institutions can problematically undermine participation and agency, even if material resource holdings remain constant. Elizabeth Anderson, ‘What is the point of equality?’ Ethics 109 (2) (1999): 287-337. I should add that the emphasis on a threshold sphere of effective agency and mutuality prevents someone from claiming that her projects and ends (i.e., her version of meaningful freedom and self- determining effective agency) requires significantly more resources than others. If I take it as my project to fly to every airport in the world, I cannot claim protection for the use of resources needed to do so on the basis of an entitlement to my own effective agency. 67 In this way the Kantian also can take heed of the concern sketched above by David Miller in much the same way as the Lockean. 68 Again, this is a point well made in the capabilities literature.

104 larger share than another it has to be justified in virtue of achieving consistency with or not undermining mutually held effective agency.

So when someone uses AAC beyond what is necessary for mutually attainable effective agency she will have violated pre-institutional principles of justice that apply directly to individuals which protect the basic Kantian inspired pre-institutional concern for freedom qua effective agency. In doing so, and falling outside one’s fair distributive share, individuals encroach upon another’s (or some other’s) pre-institutional rights of distributive justice, which constitutes a wrong.69 This is not an enforceable wrong by the coercive arm of the law yet because institutions do not yet exist, but it may be appropriately condemnable through other mechanisms of holding to account (e.g., reactive attitudes) and the appropriate target of moral persuasion, nudging, education, etc. Moreover, this form of wrongful rights violation brings with it a residue, or normative link, that follows it until institutions are actualized where redress for the violation could be legitimately enforced by the coercive arm of the law (e.g., in the form of a retroactive AAC use/benefit tax).70

As I will discuss further in Section Five, we might not be able to determine where the threshold for effective agency—and thereby what constitutes overshooting and encroaching upon others’—rests with as Kant ultimately aims, “mathematical exactitude”.

There is surely some ambiguous range as to what is required to meet that threshold for individuals. So it is best to think of these kinds of pre-institutional distributive shares as

69 To see this more schematically, assume that conditions have been met so as to trigger distributive principles, but no institutions yet exist embodying them. Imagine that the morally justified distributive scheme allots ownership to the AAC budget (before dangerous climate change begins) between 100 people on an equal per capita basis. If I take 2% of the budget, I am taking something beyond my fair share that was allotted to another or some others. Other things being equal this disrupts the norm of equal freedom as I am now in a privileged, exceptional space, even if I can’t know or identify who all is disadvantaged. 70 I say “could be” because there might be unexpected reasons to not enforce the violation after the fact.

105 prohibitions on resource use/benefit as prohibitions against using more than would be allowable at the highest end of this range.71

However, it seems even in its non-mathematically exact form, the Kantian inspired account is already determinate enough to definitively rule out a rather wide range of resource use. For example, obviously it would rule out all of the AAC going to those whose names begin with “H”. So too, slightly more controversially, they would rule out existing distributive patterns. There is simply no way to justify, consistent with the demand for a threshold of effective agency regarding would-be users of AAC, as an unowned global common pool resource of the kind we have described, the notion that the average American could use more than 200 times the average Bangladeshi with parallel inequalities in human development.72

From this angle, the Kantian style account may look to deliver a more demanding set of duties on, for instance, the average American than the Lockean style approach; distributive shares and pre-institutional rights protecting a sphere of effective agency (a I’ve construed it) are likely more extensive rights protecting secure and stable self-preservation.

However, given how the views are constructed, the story is not so simple.

One way to help clarify this is by looking at the following two graphs. Each represents a different possible world populated by four individuals and their resource use.

Also indicated is what resource allotment in the world would meet both the Lockean subsistence threshold and the Kantian fair share distribution. There are no units because the

71 This gives the Kantian inspired approach a way to vindicate part of Sinnott-Armstrong’s intuition, that a single Sunday drive is not immediately impermissible (unless it would put one over her allotment), without following him wholeheartedly down the skeptical path. One would of course always be permitted to use less than allotted to fit that range. 72 The United States had an HDI of .915 in 2014, while Bangladesh came in at .570. See United Nations Development Program, Human Development Reports (available at http://hdr.undp.org/en/data). Emissions data can be found from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, International Energy Statistics (available at http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/IEDIndex3.cfm?tid=5&pid=5&aid=8).

106 graph is representing the relation between one’s resources and one’s capabilities for self- preservation and effective agency. It is simplified and schematic to be sure, but I want it to be clear that one cannot infer total resource use from the levels indicated (i.e. D could be using less total AAC than C because she requires less as a matter of luck to secure her respective thresholds. However, assume that the relations are such that the surplus is sufficient to raise those deprived to the relevant threshold).73

Figure 1. Comparing Thresholds: World One. In World One, the Lockean analysis would suggest that C and D both have illegitimate holdings in virtue of A’s deprivation and their surplus above the threshold of secure self- preservation. For the Lockean, the fact that B does not reach the Kantian inspired threshold is immaterial to the analysis of rights and entitlements. But as long as A falls short of the threshold of secure and stable self-preservation, either through lack of access to the direct use of AAC or via the lack of benefitting from others’ direct use, both C and D count as violating A’s rights and are called upon to relinquish their use or share the benefit from it.74

73 The representation oversimplifies to draw out some lessons, because in reality the resources required to reach each threshold will differ from individual to individual. 74 To see a sympathetic account of why we need to reconceptualize how we think of violations of human rights see Elizabeth Ashford “The Inadequacy of our Traditional Conception of the Duties Imposed by Human Rights,” Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 19 (2) (2006): 217-235.

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Furthermore, the fact that D has far more illegitimate holdings and could raise A to the

Lockean threshold without C having to give anything up all the while still maintaining an overall resource advantage does not thereby entitle C to her surplus (even though she’s not beyond what would be her “Kantian” threshold). The surplus holdings of C are implicated because A and B have rights to secure and stable self-preservation and in circumstances of scarcity, such as the world presents, C’s holdings are still proximate impediments to those rights being fulfilled. Finally, if C were to give up or share the benefit of some AAC to raise up A, then D, without giving up anything, and maintaining significant resource advantages would be back in the moral clear on the Lockean style view.75

The Kantian inspired picture, however, would evaluate this world differently with respect to who is owed redistribution and who bears the duties to do so. The Kantian analysis would suggest that C is in the moral clear. She is entitled to her holdings because they are within the range of what is required for her to achieve effective agency. She has therefore not illegitimately used the resource and cannot be required to give up some of her holdings, even if doing so would raise another above the self-preservation threshold without simultaneously dropping her below that threshold.76 On the other hand, the Kantian inspired analysis would suggest that D has illegitimately used the resource. She would be required to disgorge whatever of her surplus portion of the resource (or the benefit from it) above the

Kantian mutually attainable threshold is required in order to bring both A and B to the threshold for effective agency.

75 I say this tentatively and will discuss the point further below, as a potential sticking point. It is possible that a refinement of the view might be necessary that gives C a claim against D for not contributing proportionally to illegitimate surplus use. Doing so would push the Lockean closer to the Kantian’s position, so might not mean much for the disjunctive argument I ultimately offer. 76 It might of course be beneficent, admirable, courageous, heroic, suggested by solidarity, etc. to do so, but it is not a requirement of pre-institutional justice. Moreover, she might still have duties to enforce the moral law and hold D accountable for her over-use that is implicated by the respective deprivation of A and B.

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Consider, by contrast a second world (with the same caveats on what the schematic figure is and is not representing), whose implications might already be clear.

Figure 2. Comparing Thresholds: World Two. In World Two, the Lockean inspired analysis implies no pre-institutional redistributive duties. Everybody is above the secure and stable self-preservation threshold. From the

Lockean perspective, the mere fact that D could eliminate some inequality and raise A and B to the Kantian inspired threshold, does not indicate any unfulfilled rights, wrongdoing, or generate any duties.77

The Kantian style analysis, on the other hand, would suggest again that D has illegitimate holdings; owed to A and B. Now, imagine that D relinquishes some holdings, so as to bring everybody above the threshold for effective agency but in the process expands her own capabilities to effectively realize her ends and so still maintains a comparative advantage. On the interpretation I’m offering, that kind of inequality is not problematic for the Kantian. However, it is possible that D could grow her pot of resources large enough so

77 This is at least true pre-institutionally for the Lockean, things could change once institutions of justice exist to govern behavior.

109 as to undermine the effective agency of the others, even if their actual resource holdings do not actually change.78

It is worth drawing out these theoretical differences to better understand each view and how they operate, and much more exploration could be given elsewhere. However, we need not exhaustively dive into the details for our purposes to generate a significant takeaway. While across possible worlds we can locate important divergence, I want to suggest that in our current world, as it is, grappling with the moral problem of climate change, there will be a significant convergence between the outputs of the views. If one doesn’t like the Lockean inspired mechanism (which requires that others need only meet a lower threshold, but symmetrically also protects fewer of our own resource entitlements against the demands of duty) the way to distance oneself from it while still plausibly being committed to some notion of pre-institutional moral equality will be to move closer to the

Kantian inspired model (which requires that others meet a higher threshold, but symmetrically also protects more of our own resource entitlements against the demands of duty). But, upon doing so, one will arrive at a similar destination as far as the demandingness of the duty in the world we occupy. In the empirical context of our climate duties, when we

“crunch the numbers”, so to speak, settling the controversy between the two views is not particularly necessary for action guiding purposes. I will say more about this in a moment below, but given how tight the global AAC budget is, how many users and would-be users there are, and how many billions face threats to their secure self-preservation, the threshold

78 Think of the ways in which monopolies or oligarchies can undermine the agency of individuals as they try to participate in the economy or political sphere.

110 for effective agency that is mutually attainable is not going to be too far off from one’s

Lockean threshold.79

In this I think we have the a preliminary case for pre-institutional distributive shares of AAC and a disjunctive account of why it is plausible to think that individuals have pre- institutional duties to restrict their use, or benefit from the use, of AAC to within a justifiable range, and can be morally liable for repair upon violation. The Lockean and Kantian inspired accounts are not just because they come from prominent figures in Western philosophy, but because they highlight very plausible but distinct fundamental pre-institutional rights and in the context of climate change and AAC serve as plausible preliminary accounts of fair distributive shares, pre-institutionally, and the permissions, rights, and duties that attend such shares. Appealing to different fundamental norms, the models inspired by both historical accounts point in a similar direction that I contend surely is an advance on the Hobbesian skeptic of pre-institutional constraints to resource use. Both are more plausible precisely because they can reasonably be construed as taking pre-institutional moral equality seriously, while the Hobbesian can’t. Capturing a form of moral equality, even as narrowly proscribed and modest as the Lockean’s equal rights to secure and stable self-preservation, seems so foundational that it is plausible to see it as a condition of adequacy of a view. While more work might ultimately need to be done to settle the demands of each view and settle between them, for now we can tentatively conclude that our pre-institutional duties to use

AAC are at least as demanding as the less demanding of the two views, and perhaps as demanding as the more demanding of the two views.80

79 As mentioned above, given population estimates and total AAC use budget restrictions this is likely in the range of only being entitled to retain the benefit of at most a few metric tons of CO2 per person per year. 80 As I will clarify in Section Five of this chapter, this partially normatively determinate core will have its penumbral features filled in and made fully determinate by institutional authority. It is worth mentioning that once the argument has been made that individuals have pre-institutional duties to limit the use of (or benefit from the use of) AAC, it invites questions about what companion duties attach to violations of AAC usage

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Section Four: Demandingness and Priority to Disgorge

I want to briefly consider how we should think about the differences between the

Lockean and Kantian inspired accounts as they relate to duties to disgorge surplus resources

(outside one’s fair distributive share, pre-institutionally) and the demandingness thereof. It is worth mentioning that each view is a basic account of resource entitlements and legitimacy of using/benefitting without an explicit account of degrees of wrongness associated with illegitimate use or priority to disgorge resources among those with a surplus. I think there are important things to say that, without filling out the account in full detail, will help better understand the conceptual space. I want to suggest that we can distinguish between these categories by reflecting on the extent and purpose of resource use above the threshold for legitimacy (i.e., outside one’s fair distributive share).

Let’s look first from the perspective of the Kantian inspired view. While she is committed to the importance of a threshold of effective agency, we’ve seen that this

duties. I call these reparative duties, which it seems could work on two dimensions that track common discussions of “mitigation” and “adaptation”. First, one might attempt repair by undoing one’s over-use by way of contributing back into AAC, namely adding carbon sinks and thus re-stocking the commons. Second, one might try to repair the overuse by directly alleviating harm from climate change or contributing to other adaptation efforts. (While perhaps obvious, it is worth highlighting that if one conceives of the reparative duty as a duty to directly alleviate harm, it is still importantly different from run-of-the-mill humanitarian duties to aid, or rescue, which individuals might very well have over and above the climate specific reparative duties, which depend for their existence on illegitimately using more than one’s fair share of AAC. The bare humanitarian duties are not so rooted, and could obtain even if someone didn’t illegitimately use the resource or even after they paid their debt simply in virtue of one’s ability to alleviate suffering.) While I will not attempt to give a full account or settle all of the interesting questions here, and leave the point for future consideration, as a matter of action guidance, it will be important to know whether there is a structure that holds between these options. Is there a relation of priority, for instance? Given what I said above regarding the justification for a Lockean or Kantian distributive scheme possibly being given with reference to AAC use or distribution of the benefit of use, it would seem, if one had a perfect translation scheme, that there is no straightforward conceptual reason to prioritize one over the other. There might however be contingent reasons to do so. First, if it is easier or more reliably equivalent to estimate over use and replenishment, than translating overuse to some measure of benefit that could be a point in favor of the first option. However, this might cut against, in some instances, the likelihood of realizing the kind of aim that justifies the limitation. For instance, if I repair my AAC debt by replenishing a carbon sink, the restored absorptive capacity might just get taken by some jet setter. Whereas if I take in a climate refugee or fund green adaptation works in developing countries, I literally benefit those affected by AAC over-use. I won’t try to settle the issue here, but the important takeaway is that even if there are questions about how the duty is structured in this disjunctive manner, the chief argumentative burden establishing the existence of demanding pre-institutional duties wouldn’t be in question.

112 presupposes as more basic the lower Lockean style threshold of secure self-preservation.

Because of this, if we imagine a third world (below) of supreme scarcity where circumstances do not admit of securing the threshold of effective agency for all and some others aren’t even secure in their self-preservation, even the Kantian will have strong reason to suggest people give up resources that are in service of securing effective agency for securing self- preservation. This is one way of narrowing the gap between the views in context.

Figure 3. Comparing Thresholds: World Three. Now consider things from the perspective of the Lockean. If we go back to World

One, the Lockean is committed to the idea that both C and D are illegitimately using surplus resources. However, there is no reason for her to deny (and in fact very good reason for her to accept) the extremely important moral value of people being able to live lives as effective agents. Because of this the Lockean has avenues to suggest that D is in a worse position and priority to disgorge should fall on her first. She is holding on to more resources that are in service of things of less moral value. This is yet another way in which the gap narrows between the two views.

Just as the Kantian inspired threshold can sometimes provide some buffer against the wrongness of, and priority to disgorge, surplus use past the Lockean threshold, we might

113 wonder whether there are morally significant values attached to other purposes for surplus use beyond securing effective agency that serve a similar function. The disjunctive view I have presented has the potential to be very demanding, and those concerned about demandingness are likely on the lookout for other moral values to buffer against the demands of what they will have to sacrifice.81 In principle it does seem as though there are important additional distinctions to make. Even if everybody is above the threshold for effective agency it seems worse and a higher priority for disgorgement when people use their surplus in ways that are completely wasteful or merely pursuing pure preference-satisfaction or hedonic fun than if they use it to contributing to meaningful, identify-shaping projects.82

The latter are deeper and vastly more significant moral values. I want in no way to deny this.

I do however want to maintain that if in fact we think, as we should, there is a baseline of morally vital considerations like the Lockean or Kantian inspired thresholds to which everyone has an entitlement, it is implausible to think that these kinds of admitted moral values could override the demand to disgorge. To do so would be to violate the most basic form of reciprocity that we sketched by Anna Stilz above. To do so would be to deny to others what you think would be minimally required for yourself. The world we currently inhabit, unfortunately, is one in which these distinctions largely get swamped out in generating a relatively clear sense of the kinds of demanding action required of those worried that these distinctions might make a difference to them. There are such huge numbers of individuals falling below either threshold that the reductions in, or benefit sharing of, AAC are so large they will cut against waste, luxury, pure hedonic pursuits, and deeply meaningful

81 I should flag here that it is certainly up for dispute how much weight considerations of demandingness should bear in our theory. 82 I am not quite sure how to understand the degrees of wrongness or priority to disgorge between, say, slightly more over-use put to deeply meaningful tasks slightly less over-use for purely hedonistic purposes. Which is better or preferable is certainly something we can argue about with, I think, reasonable disagreement on both sides.

114 projects of vast swaths of the global affluent, who are each (from the right global perspective) positioned more like D than C in World One.

So when scholars attempt to waive the demandingness flag, or engage with Henry

Shue’s distinction between “subsistence” and “luxury” emissions to try to find where the line sits at which their resource holdings are protected against, or where there their wrongness and priority to disgorge are buffered against I think it is implausible when they arrive at a picture very close to the status quo.

For instance, Christian Baatz, whose view we mentioned at the start as being one that pays attention to the pre-institutional/post-institutional distinction with respect to distributive justice, provides a clear instantiation of this ultimately problematic strategy.

Baatz develops a view in which our emissions entitlements and the duties that attach to them are indexed to how dependent those emissions are on the “carbon-intensive structures” we are embedded within.83 The more dependent our emissions are on structural features around us, the less we can be asked to give them up. Just as the Kantian inspired threshold for effective agency protected more of our own resource entitlements against the demands of duty than the Lockean, Baatz’s view attempts to protect even more than that in virtue of how they depend on external structures.

Ostensibly, Baatz attempts to provide an argument that individuals have a duty to eliminate “luxury” emissions. That much I agree with. Unfortunately, he wrongly thinks that those are the only pre-institutional emissions that we are obligated to eliminate and in the process of trying to justify that conclusion, he comes to an implausible view about which emissions will count as “luxury” emissions.

83 Baatz, “Climate Change and Individual Duties to Reduce GHG Emissions,” p. 3.

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On Baatz’s view of what count as luxury emissions, individuals’ have duties to reduce emissions only when

“an action generating GHG emissions either (a) has no moral weight or (b) an alternative course of action (that is to be considered as an adequate substitute) causing less emissions exists.”84

This is a significant and implausible narrowing of what counts as “luxury” emissions and expansion of what can count as legitimate with any plausible claim to respecting the basic moral equality of all, given our tight global AAC budget. If all of the emissions that cleared these standards as non-luxury emissions were protected against the demands of duties to be reduced or eliminated, we would never reach our targets of between 40-70% global reductions in emissions by 2050. To see why, consider problems with both a) and b) in Baatz’s schema.

Very few emissions actually have no moral weight. Many of our emissions are caught up in our projects and ends that are deeply autonomy enhancing, identity-constituting, and meaningful. They facilitate familial obligations. They support the bonds of friendship. They satisfy deep and enduring preferences. Even my purchase of a second yacht has some moral weight. In the very least I derive pleasure from it and pleasure is morally significant feature.85

So if only those emissions that have no moral weight are possible candidates for counting as luxury emissions and requiring reductions, the list will be quite small.

As such, virtually all of the work would have to come out of Baatz’s second disjunct, stated in b). Baatz doesn’t provide an interpretation for what would count as “adequate

84 Ibid., p. 15. One reason why he thinks this is because he thinks it maps on to what others can “reasonably demand”. Even if that were true, which I think is false of most people in OECD countries, what one has duties to do can come apart from what can be “reasonably demanded” by third parties. The duty can linger, even if the pragmatics of holding responsible suggest re-directing demands elsewhere. One basic example of this might be gratitude. It is plausible that we can owe duties of gratitude to people but it not be demandable. 85 Even emissions that look like pure waste, such as leaving the lights on when I leave the house do not meet this condition. Not worrying about it provides some ease or comfort to me, which is not completely lacking moral weight.

116 substitute”. Trying to fill it in runs into difficulties quickly. Intuitively, if I live in Florida and do all city/highway driving, it seems like a fuel efficient car might be an adequate substitute for driving a gas guzzling Jeep. But imagine I live in the mountains of Colorado and do significant off-roading. It is less clear switching to a hybrid would be an “adequate” substitute. This ambiguity that depends on the plurality of values involved in our decision- making has the potential to multiply through many of our behaviors.

Moreover, of course sometimes even if some emission use has moral weight, and there is a substitute (whatever we ultimately mean) with fewer emissions, that doesn’t always permit using the substitute as Baatz’s view implies. That substitute might also be illegitimate and we might have to drop the admitted moral value. To run an analogy, if I were to steal a candy bar from the corner store and give it to my roommate, he would be joyous and appreciative. We would forge new bonds of friendship. These are moral values. I could admittedly steal a smaller, less expensive candy bar that would also do those same things. But of course I am not thereby permitted to use the smaller amount. Given the Lockean-Kantian inspired arguments on offer above, I think the GHG emissions case is structurally similar.

Finally, though, once we have made the move to talking about AAC rather than emissions, per se, we will be able to question the very idea that having one’s emissions dependent on structures is the kind of thing that could defeat one’s duties of distributive justice. Some of one’s emissions might depend on carbon-intensive structures that cannot be avoided without threatening to disrupt the Lockean or Kantian norms, but that doesn’t mean we are entitled to the use of the AAC. Given that we can use and, to some measure, replenish AAC, it seems plausible that even if we are forced into emitting more carbon due to intensive structures, the principles of justice aren’t simply defeated and one can be bound to replenish AAC in other ways as compensation.

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Thus I think there is good reason to reject Baatz’ specific move to temper the demandingness of the combined Lockean-Kantian inspired account. But there are also further general reasons to be skeptical of any companion views that might attempt, via alternative routes, to do so and protect more of our emissions above the plausibly more permissive Kantian threshold from the demands of duty given the moral problem we face in climate change. These reasons ultimately boil down to the fact that settling moral duties in this domain occurs in conditions of uncertainty. Like every such case there is an element of moral risk involved. Of course there could be a technological magic bullet that either eliminates vulnerability below the Lockean self-preservation threshold or expands Kantian effective agency to mitigate the demandingness of the duty. While that possibility needs to be balanced in the all things considered determination of the duties, the overwhelming weight of the uncertainty and moral risk is on the other side, such that even upon interpreting the Lockean and Kantian threshold rather thinly we likely still face the prospect of tragically more people falling below them. I will raise three in particular here.

The first is what happens when we consider population projections over the next century. The UN World Population Division projects, using their “medium fertility” models, that by 2050 there will be 9.7 billion people on the planet. By 2100 that figure goes to 11.2 billion, adding a total of around 4 billion people in “less developed regions” from current population figures.86 These numbers, first and foremost, significantly increase the likelihood that there will be people falling below the Lockean threshold in order to trigger its implications for those above it. But moreover it shows us, that we need to be wary of interpreting what counts as “secure self-preservation” with too many AAC-use-heavy

86 Under conditions of high fertility those numbers could balloon to 10.8 and 16.6 billion, respectively. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. World Population Prospects: The 2015 Revision (2015).

118 features (like Baatz or others might want in efforts to curb demanding reductions from the status quo), so as to not completely overshoot the global budget with increasing populations.

These points suggest a similar tightening, on the Kantian inspired model, of how expansively one could interpret effective agency that is mutually attainable, given an increase in the number of individuals needing a fair share.87

A further reason to doubt the plausibility of more permissive assessments of what individuals are allowed to use in the wake of the problem we face involves probability assessments regarding actually staying within the AAC budget. The IPCC figures requiring

40-70% emissions reductions by 2050 and 100% or further by 2100 all leave as much as a

33% chance that even accomplishing such reductions we surpass the 2°C threshold of dangerous climate change. We have already discussed that this 2°C figure is overly conservative and there is increasing consensus around a 1.5°C target.88 To reach that, or to at least increase the probabilities, requires a smaller global budget, which translates in to smaller mutually attainable shares and can’t count the kinds of emissions that Baatz or others would want to mitigate the demandingness of the duty as normatively protected without making it significantly less probable, or even impossible to hit such targets.

These are not going to be easy conclusions to for many to accept. Our lives are structured to use AAC far beyond the Kantian’s more permissive threshold in their quotidian details but also to build bonds of friendship, engage in meaningful work and

87 For more on this, and some thoughts about how to prevent population increases from completely swamping out our ability to deal with climate change see Hickey, Rieder, and Earl, “Population Engineering and the Fight against Climate Change.” 88 And we’ve seen some scholars think that we’ve actually already used up AAC and are already using atmospheric space beyond capacity, and so any use beyond the thresholds would be even harder to justify.

119 identity crafting activity, pursue necessary recreation from life’s stresses, etc. Unfortunately, even more foundational moral norms are at stake.89

Section Five: The Normative Role and Authority of Institutions

As I mentioned at the outset, this chapter’s primary goal was articulating a preliminary account of fair distributive shares, in the pre-institutional setting, and thereby of the existence of pre-institutional duties to limit use, or benefit from the use, of AAC to within a justifiable range.90 Through the disjunctive Lockean-Kantian inspired account I have attempted to do so. While not “mathematically exact”, we have, as a moral minimum, a normatively determinate core that can bind individuals pre-institutionally. Recall that the secondary aim was to assess what implications this has for the assignment of duties to collectivize and the shape of collective institutions that are to be created. This final section takes up this task.

I want to first look at what the preceding argument tells us about what the structure of such collective institutions should look like. We’ve seen that the Kantian style account presupposes the moral value of the Lockean threshold, and the Lockean has good reason to prioritize securing for all the Kantian inspired threshold of effective agency if resources permit. With this chief overlay between the fundamental values at stake pre-institutionally, both will imply the need for an institutional structure best designed to secure them. They will

89 It is important to remember that not every activity that the globally affluent engage in will get undermined by this position. But the norms to which those activities are beholden are in service of securing the Lockean- Kantian thresholds. We still need resources going to climate science and adaptation efforts. This will require flights around the world. Even wealthy places like NY or Florida might be entitled to sea walls, etc. to prevent their situation becoming precarious and fragile. 90 Again, this was in light of many thinkers both inside the climate ethics literature and beyond it who have thought that pre-institutional rights and duties with respect to resource use are either non-existent or too unclear to deliver over any content. We saw this manifest in Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Baylor Johnson who think that at most individuals have duties to support the creation of collective institutions to solve the problems of climate change. It is also a central part of Onora O’Neill’s work that is skeptical of duties to support human rights outside of a context of institutional assignment. See Onora O’Neill, “The Dark Side of Human Rights,” International Affairs 81 (2) (2005): 427-439.

120 serve as the foundation or basis for institutions to be formed on. An institutional structure with this task will facilitate the enforcement of various forms of disgorgement and redistribution in service of this fundamental aim. In that we can see part of the structure of the institutions will be to translate pre-institutional moral prohibitions, requirements, and permissions regarding distributive justice into institutional ones.91

However, in addition to the important practical role of securing the Lockean-

Kantian threshold, institutions of climate justice have a more theoretically significant normative role. Namely, they constitute new normative material by filling out the morally minimal pre-institutional normative core that we receive from the disjunctive Lockean-

Kantian inspired account. Some but not all norms of distributive justice regarding individual

AAC use are determinate and authoritative pre-institutionally. This means that there is an important element of normative authority that institutions wield to transform and give shape to individual duties of justice.92

We have already seen one reason for this in recognizing that the duty is at least as demanding as the less demanding of the two views, and perhaps as demanding as the more demanding of the two views. While this range is fairly small, it is an ambiguity needing resolution through institutional structures. But even once we accomplish that, there is another need for institutional authority. To clearly see why, we need to examine something

91 One way to put this is that they will be structured to turn pre-institutional distributive rights into determinate legal rights. This will bring with it enforcement mechanisms to ensure compliance and hold individuals to account with more than our standard moral repertoire that includes reactive attitudes or social sanction. Moreover, it generates formal and procedural avenues for complaint and moral redress through the legal system. In that, they are central for guaranteeing the stability required to accomplish the global task. One other element of the role associated with this structure is that, by embodying and enforcing principles of justice, actual institutions can help build what Cohen calls the “ethos” of justice. 92 Elizabeth Ashford had done important work trying to understand that institutions play a role in transforming, reassigning, bundling, dividing, etc. duties to better secure basic rights, with less cost. See Elizabeth Ashford, “The Duties Imposed by the Human Right to Basic Necessities,” in Thomas Pogge (ed.), Freedom From Poverty as a Human Right: Who Owes What to the Very Poor? Co-Published with UNESCO, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 182-218.

121 we can call the problem of multiple realizability. This is a problem that stems from the recognition that there are likely multiple, mutually justifiable interpretations of AAC distribution that would satisfy either the central governing norms of secure and stable self- preservation for the Lockean or a threshold of effective agency for the Kantian inspired view.93 Options X, Y, and Z might be eliminated, but options A, B, and C could all satisfy the Lockean-Kantian disjunctive theoretical foundation for pre-institutional distributive justice. Yet we need coordination so that some individuals do not do A, while others do B or

C in a way that collectively fails to satisfy that foundation. Without communication and coordination among these options at a global institutional level, we would never know if we were pursuing some interpretation that could be justifiable if everyone were to follow it, but which is not, in fact justifiable because others decided to plumb for another justifiable, yet incompatible, option.94

In short, then, the element of authority that institutions have in determining norms of distributive justice regarding AAC use is in settling on one of the options. Actualizing a specific version of institutions that are consistent with the disjunctive Lockean-Kantian

93 There is at least reasonable disagreement without clear avenues to settle disputes. This may not in principle rule out the possibility that one simply is the correct one, but I think it should cast doubt on epistemic confidence we might have and encourage a partially ecumenical approach that takes into consideration the various procedural mechanism that come with institutional ratification. 94 This kind of problem can surface for any kind of distribution, even if we only have one value that is subject to a simple maximizing rule. If it helps to think through an example, imagine all we care about is maximizing happiness. Consider a group of five people that has to decide how to distribute ten mangoes between them. Calvin is a mango fiend and receives a hedon for every mango he receives, up to six and none beyond that. Hobbes loves mango and receives a hedon for every mango up to two and none beyond that. The other three receive a hedon for the first mango they receive and none for any additional mangoes. We could get ten hedons multiple ways. For instance. 1. Calvin could get six mangoes and the rest one. 2. Calvin could get five mangoes, Hobbes get two, and the rest one. Even though each of these is an option, if Calvin decides that he’s going to take mangoes according to the scheme in 2, but Hobbes and the rest decide to take mangoes according to the scheme in 1, we do not ultimately satisfy the fundamental norm of maximizing happiness, even though each operates on a distributive scheme that itself would. When we add multiple values (equality, freedom, etc.), do not have clear maximizing rules, and are trying to justify distributions consistent with them, we should expect multiple justifiable pathways in even more complex ways.

122 theoretical foundation (e.g., option A) can make it wrong for individuals to act in accordance with a different version (e.g., B or C), even though that other version would have been consistent with that foundation prior to such actualization (because of multiple realizability).

This is genuine normative authority because before such institutions are actualized, if someone is acting consistent with a possible option that satisfies the theoretical foundation

(B, or C) that happens to not be identical with the one that later gets actualized (A), they won’t have done wrong.95 However, in light of actualizing A, an institutional determination, their obligations and rights moving forward transform (consistent with the A-rules), and if they do not abide by those, they will do wrong (by following B or C rules).96 By way of summary, the Lockean and Kantian inspired views take simple principles of equality and self-preservation or freedom qua threshold of effective agency as basic and show how they inform and constrain multiple possible institutional arrangements. This theoretical

95 Until institutions are actualized individuals cannot do wrong by acting in accordance with any version, A, B, or C that could be consistent with the theoretical foundation, but the further down the path we are to realizing one vision than another, the stronger the reasons are to bring one’s behavior in line with the version that is in the process of being actualized (rather than some other version that is also consistent with the theoretical foundation). If institutional determinations were made in an instant, this wouldn’t matter, but in the real world it is always a process. We can think of this as an analogue to the sub-erogatory for this domain—on a scale, becoming worse and worse, edging towards wrongness, which kicks in when the institutions are fully online. One might be concerned that it is rather arbitrary to think that “wrongness” comes in exactly when the version is actualized and not just before when all the writing is on the wall that the institutions will be A rather than B or C. Boundaries are often vague, and of course sometimes it can be a problem to accept such a bright line, but there are also virtues in being able to point to something clean. We know we have to place a line somewhere and having it co-travel with another fact (the actualization of a particular institutional scheme) seems to be at least a more unified place than alternatives. 96 Once there is an institution governing the practice that is consistent with the Lockean-Kantian theoretical foundation of distributive justice, individuals do not have the leeway to depart from its regulations (even if for a different version of institutions that would have been consistent with that foundation). Attempting to do so constitutes a wrong and an injustice. But it has an importantly different structure than the first way in which you could go wrong—which is to over-use AAC in a way that is inconsistent with any version of the disjunctive theoretical foundation and any version of possible future ideal institutions embodying them. This asymmetry is where the moral authority of actualizing institutions reveals itself. Sometimes it seems authority depends as much on the process that constitutes it (say, democracy) as the efficacy of its mandates. We can take this point to our case about AAC and distributive schemes. Within the range of reasonable options (A, B, C) one might think that more than mere communication and coordination matters to its authority. Democracy is often taken to be a component of what equal respect and mutual justifiability takes, especially in the wake of disagreement about principles. Obviously a global vote (including proxies for future stakeholders in the content of the principles) is infeasible and global climate talks now a far from realizing anything like democratic procedures, but perhaps part of the ultimate authority of A, B, or C depends on arrival through democratic process.

123 foundation which governs individual behavior pre-institutionally, gives us the first cut of what actions are prohibited, required, and permitted without referencing actual or idealized institutional decisions.97 But that theoretical foundation is, inevitably, somewhat coarse grained and not fully determinate (precisely because it serves as the basic grounding) and so is multiply realizable in different sets of ideal future institutions, for which the foundation sets the terms.98

Concluding Remarks

In this chapter, I have argued that individuals are, pre-institutionally, bound as a matter of global distributive justice to restrict their use, or benefit from the use, of atmospheric absorptive capacity (AAC) to within a specified justifiable range and that this serves as the normative basis for what distributively just global institutions to govern climate change would look like in allocating access to, or shares of, that resource and its benefits.

The arguments in this chapter play overlapping roles in service of filling out significant parts of a particular kind of theory of distributive justice and redeeming the promise as an

97 However, there is still likely a normative role for idealized future institutions. It is not the kind of normative authority that actualized institutions have or of the Lockean-Kantian theoretical base, but I think idealized institutions can play a pragmatic role. Idealized institutions show us a vision of possible end states and hopefully shed light on possible transitional pathways to them. If, given current empirical facts on the ground, one version (e.g. A) of the sets of possible future institutions that are consistent with foundation of distributive justice seems more accessible, achievable, less risky, on a shorter time horizon, etc., then that idealized future institution might play an action-guiding normative role. As mentioned above, once we start making decisions down a path to one version rather than another (A rather than B or C), the chosen ideal takes on more standing and the strength of the reasons increase favoring bringing one’s individual behavior in line with it (rather than another realization of idealized institutions that are also consistent with the normative foundation of distributive justice—of course behaviors/AAC use outside of the range of reasonable disagreement about what that foundation requires are already off the table). But this is largely in virtue of facilitating effective adoption of just institutions. If there were no transition costs, and doing so didn’t slow or prevent the adoption of just institutions, then there would be no problem in challenging one version halfway down the road, for another. But in real life there are transition costs. 98 If one is not wholly satisfied with the arguments to this point for the existence of such distributive shares and pre-institutional duties, the account can still hold as a non-trivial principled limit on the demandingness of such duties were one to independently strengthen and better develop any of its component parts (which I certainly welcome). Likewise, it could still serve as a non-trivial standard governing distributive shares for basic institutions of climate justice. Minimally, I hope to have shown that this is a uniquely promising general shape of an approach if one feels the force of the necessity of giving an account of pre-institutional climate duties.

124 adequate account of climate morality because it simultaneously, and in a unified way, recognizes the importance of collective institutions, captures the distribution of collective institutional responsibility in light of distributive shares of AAC and the permissions, rights, and duties that attach to those, and explains pre-institutional responsibilities and their relationship to collective institutional responsibility.99

I turn, now, in the final chapter to round out the development of the theory by providing an account of the pre-institutional duty to help create just climate governing institutions.

99 I want to clarify that this is not a complete theory of distributive justice for all the earth’s resources or a full theory of redistribution of wealth as some suggest like Pogge’s global resource dividend or Tim Hayward’s notion of ecological space. Part of the reason for this is precisely the pre-institutional modesty. AAC is truly unowned more obviously globally rival and non-excludable, unlike other resources, and so requires fewer (controversial) commitments to think its distribution ought to be manipulated or that some egalitarian principles should govern it. With fewer assumptions and baggage, it can however, accomplish a radical set of redistributive duties, and quite serious “bang” for one’s buck, as it were, if one is looking for significant redistribution. See, e.g., Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), Thomas Pogge, “Allowing the Poor to Share the Earth,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 8 (3) (2011): 335-352, Tim Hayward, “Thomas Pogge’s Global Resources Dividend: A Critique and an Alternative,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 2 (3) (2005): 317-332, Tim Hayward, “Global Justice and the Distribution of Natural Resources,” Political Studies 54 (2) (2006): 349–369, Tim Hayward, “Human Rights Versus Emissions Rights - Climate Justice and Equitable Distribution,” Ethics & International Affairs 21 (4) (2007): 431–450, Tim Hayward, “On the Nature of Our Debt to the Global Poor,” Journal of Social Philosophy 39 (1) (2008): 1-19. Simon Caney also falls into a similar camp, “Just Emissions.” Simon Caney, “Two Kinds of Climate Justice: Avoiding Harm and Sharing Burdens,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 22 (2) (2014): 125-149.

125

Distributive Justice and Individual Duties to Create Just Climate Institutions

Introduction

In this chapter I defend an account of the individual duty to participate in the creation of just climate institutions, which I will also refer to as the duty to collectivize. Many scholars have gestured at duties to participate in the creation of just institutions.1 Climate ethicists largely agree that individuals have duties to join in the effort to secure collective institutions equipped to mitigate and adapt to climate change.2 Rarely, however, are such duties critically explored in depth. On the heels of what I have argued in the previous chapters, I present two distinct but mutually supporting justifications for such a duty. I maintain that this duty is most essentially a duty to adopt a certain kind of end. There are many routes toward demonstrating that one has sufficiently adopted that end, and what would demonstrate such adoption depends on historical, social, and material facts of individuals in question. However, I suggest some resources for thinking through a floor past which one must certainly cross in order to plausibly count as having adopted the end and a ceiling on what could plausibly be required of one to count as having adopted the end.

Moreover, I suggest three important general metrics by which we should begin to characterize individuals in order to see what the profile of their duty to collectivize looks like. I further argue that we should not think of each individual’s duty to participate in the

1 See, e.g., Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Laura Valentini, “The Natural Duty of Justice in Non-Ideal Circumstances: On the Moral Demands of Institution-Building and Reform,” (unpublished manuscript accessed via email correspondence). 2 See, e.g., Sinnott-Armstrong, “It’s Not My Fault”, Baylor Johnson, “Ethical Obligations in a Tragedy of the Commons”, Marion Hourdequin. “Climate, Collective Action, and Individual Ethical Obligations”, Ronald Sandler “Ethical Theory and the Problem of Inconsequentialism”. Even while playing such a key role given the non-ideal world we live in without many of the institutions of justice that seem required, little ink is spilled to fill in the content of such duties. The shape, strength, satisfaction-conditions, and implications of the duty are often left hollow and unhelpfully vague.

126 creation of just climate governing institutions as some finite percentage of the total agential effort required for their creation, like apportioning “wedges of a pie”. Instead, I want to suggest that if everyone actually did what, for them, would constitute sufficiently adopting the end it would amount to more total agential activity than would have been strictly required to create the institutions. That is to say, the overall system of duties to collectivize has built in redundancy. Finally, I end the chapter by raising considerations about these duties regarding the prospect of non-compliance by others. I argue that in our context, it is unlikely that collectivization duties of the shape I have argued for will be defeated by the non-compliance of others.

Section One: Justifying Individual Duties to Participate in the Creation of Just Climate Institutions

I argued previously that to adequately account for climate morality we need to think of the moral problem of climate change as a matter of global distributive justice regarding a scarce, valuable, rival, non-excludable global resource that no one owns (atmospheric absorptive capacity, or AAC). Furthermore, in the last chapter I defended an account of individual duties regarding the use of that resource. Primarily, that account aimed to establish that individuals are required to restrict their use, or benefit from the use, of AAC to within a specified justifiable range, in our present pre-institutional context. But I also argued that it serves as the normative basis for what distributively just global institutions to govern climate change would look like in allocating access to that resource and its benefits.

As an avoidable, predictable, anthropogenically caused moral problem of the sort I have described, climate change requires the existence of justly organized collective institutions to govern the use of AAC. It is a common-pool resource that is prone to overuse and encourages freeriding, problems which can only be securely solved through institutional mechanisms in order to avoid the catastrophic and far-reaching effects of climate change.

127

Such institutional collectives need to adaptably and flexibly respond over time to changes in the empirical landscape as actions taken up in the global arena generate feedback to update scientific predictions and their normative implications, to be looped back into further institutional management and action. As technologies, AAC use-patterns, and populations shift, the institutional structure governing AAC needs to be able to shift responsively. This kind of careful management of AAC needs to extend for as long as GHGs are considered for use; perhaps in perpetuity but at least until significant atmospheric carbon is reabsorbed.

We know from the previous chapter that it would not be enough, given the understanding of the moral problem on offer to have institutions that simply cap emissions and achieve our atmospheric concentration and mean global temperature increase targets in just any old way—e.g., giving them all to North Dakotans. Because the global resource is unowned and widely valuable, there seems to be good reason to think that distributive norms regarding use of that resource are essential to morally defensible institutions. I have tried to give in the previous chapter a partial account of the constraints on the justifiability of a distributive scheme.

As I suggested in the second chapter, while states will be a central players in the institutional mechanisms to solve these problems, no state itself can solve climate change and a number of states could unilaterally upend global hopes of avoiding catastrophic climate change. Therefore, ultimately, to secure against overuse and freeriding among states, stable and enduring broader, global, collective institutions are necessary to manage, facilitate, coordinate, and enforce action and policy between states. The UNFCCC is but a small and fragile step to this end, as a voluntary agreement without secured plans for emissions reductions to avoid 2°C and no enforcement mechanisms to actually manage use of the resource.

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If the preceding material makes sense, then there seems to be an imperative to transition from a pre-institutional context to an institutional context regarding AAC. The fact that we need but currently lack certain kinds of global institutions suggests that there must be some duty holders bearing the burden to create such institutions.3 I do not want to deny that some of the duty holders for collectivizing might be nation states or other smaller collectives (states, companies, NGOs, etc.) However, as was discussed in chapter two, whatever duties collectives bear will have implications for at least some of their constitutive members and when collectives are not fulfilling their duties (in this case by failing to collectivize even further to create the stable and enduring global institutions to manage AAC use) it is plausible that others may, at least, inherit duties to pick up that slack.4

Beyond what may come to some individuals from existing collectives, either derivative of them or to pick up their slack, however, I want to suggest that in fact individual moral agents all have a pro tanto duty to participate in the creation of just climate governing institutions (or to “collectivize” for short). Importantly, however, this is a duty that requires potentially significantly different things of different agents. The basis for this claim has

3 Recall the Moorean shift argument from ch. 1. 4 In the final analysis, I actually suggest that, ultimately, these duties shouldn’t be considered “picking up the slack,” but instead part of their initial distribution of duties, so this claim is only a convenient designator for the moment. We can now see more clearly one important lesson, going back to the collectivist view analyzed in chapter two. What collectivists get fundamentally right is the deep connection between climate change, as a matter of justice, and collectivization into institutions that can govern the moral problem. What they fail to properly appreciate is the structure that demands collectivization prior to the existence of such institutions and what that can mean for individuals in a pre-institutional setting. A quick note on terminology: Elizabeth Cripps thinks of any individual climate duties as “weakly” collective duties, because collective action is required in order to accomplish anything (see her Climate Change and the Moral Agent: Individual Duties in an Interdependent World, [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013]). While I want to agree about the importance of acting with others, I think it is misleading to call the duties “collective”, when we do not yet have sufficient existing collective agents. I think it is better to think of them as duties to collectivize, or perhaps inelegantly “collectivization duties”. It is better thought of as, in Larry May’s terms “shared” responsibility, not collective. See Larry May, Sharing Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), Ch. 2. May, however, thinks that the distinction is that shared responsibility is “distributed” while collective responsibility is not. This cannot be quite right because paradigmatically collective duties like that of a government for self-defense surely has components distributed to specific soldiers, generals, policy-makers, etc. Depending on the level of explanation and analysis even collective duties are “distributed”.

129 already been laid in the previous chapter with the disjunctive Lockean-Kantian inspired account of pre-institutional distributive shares and their attending duties. All of us are participants in the behavioral practices that generate the moral problem by using AAC, our scarce, valuable, unowned, global common-pool resource. I argued that individuals are, pre- institutionally, bound as a matter of global distributive justice to restrict their use, or benefit from the use, of atmospheric absorptive capacity (AAC) to within a specified justifiable range. This range however is an ambiguity that needs resolution through institutional structures. The content of one’s duty and permissions regarding AAC is not fully determined without the existence of climate of climate institutions to do the specification. There is a normative demand on each of us that we cannot completely satisfy without institutions, which I suggest brings with it a commitment to establishing them so as to clarify the content of one’s other obligations. There is thus an important normative link between the two kinds of duties I am arguing for in this dissertation.5 Situated in a pre-institutional context, this link generates duties for individuals to “collectivize”, or participate in the creation of just climate governing institutions in order to mitigate catastrophic climate change.

In her response to Baylor Johnson and other similar views, Marion Hourdequin has suggested that there might be an integrity-based link starting from the acceptance of a duty to support the creation of just institutions, which many climate ethicists do in some form or another, and accepting a requirement to reduce one’s own emissions.6 While I think she

5 I cannot develop a full argument for the claim here, but if one is skeptical of the existence of pre-institutional distributive shares and duties of the kind I argued for, but find some promise in it as an account of the basic constraints or standards governing distributive shares for institutions of climate justice, one might try to defend a link from the commitment to the demands of those not-yet existing institutions to pre-institutional duties to participate in their creation, even if not any link to pre-institutional distributive shares or duties to limit resource use. 6 Baylor Johnson holds the position that because the climate problem is a collective action problem, our responsibilities are to support a collective action solution, rather than, say, reduce our own carbon footprint, “Ethical Obligations in a Tragedy of the Commons.” Marion Hourdequin has deftly pressed on the extent that obligations to participate in collective action solutions might imply obligations to reduce one’s individual

130 might be right, we can see the story here as importantly reversing the point as well. The idea sketched above is that because there is a partially determinate, but incompletely specified normative demand on us with respect to our pre-institutional AAC use, which we need to make determinate, we are required to participate in creating the collective institutions that would render that duty determinate and allow us to discharge that normative demand fully.7

Borrowing language from Hourdequin, this is an important way of integrating our commitments as a matter of pre-institutional distributive justice as AAC users (i.e., our fair distributive shares and the pre-institutional duties attached to them) and the institutions of justice that are required to fairly govern that resource, enforce those shares, and actually avoid the moral problems associated with institutional vacuum.

I anticipate that some might suggest that there is a way to fully discharge the duty without committing to participate in the creation of just climate institutions. Perhaps one could simply voluntarily adhere to the more demanding of the disjunctive account, thereby using the lower quantity of AAC, so as to cover one’s bases. Even doing so, I want to suggest that there would be something problematic if one merely reduces one’s AAC use to accord with the more demanding end of the disjunctive range without committing to participate in the creation of just climate institutions.8 The central rights at stake in the account of pre-institutional distributive shares and the duty to restrict one’s AAC use regard the protection of individual’s rights to secure and stable self-preservation and effective agency. Just climate governing institutions are necessary to secure those operative rights by

emissions even in the absence of collective action solutions as a matter of moral integrity. See esp. p. 448 of her “Climate, Collective Action, and Individual Ethical Obligations.” 7 If one is not convinced by my account of the existence of the duty to participate in the creation of just climate governing institutions, the rest of the account can still be of service to those already independently committed to the existence of such a duty. 8 Admittedly, such a reduction in AAC use might itself go a long way to show that one is committed, but there is clearly a difference between the hermit in retreat and the activist.

131 avoiding catastrophic climate change and governing the distribution of AAC. While one’s individual reductions may seem to avoid some measure of dirty hands, without a commitment to the existence of just institutions, it still seems to betray a lack of integration of one’s commitments in the name of distributive justice by not being committed to the very thing required to secure the rights connected to the duty one is acting on.

Section Two: Duty to Collectivize as Adopting an End

Throughout the rest of the chapter I try to develop an account of the structure and content of duties to collectivize. When we begin to think about what individuals might be required to do to help create just climate institutions, there are going to be some obvious candidates for what might count as doing so. As a short sample list, one could vote and campaign for the right candidates, donate to the right organizations, invest in the right companies, sign petitions, organize or join marches, protests, or other grassroots efforts, lobby one’s local officials, write articles, open letters, or op-eds, produce other climate- related media, teach students, persuade or nudge one’s social network to do the same, etc.

Simply reducing one’s AAC usage itself might even count as part of helping create just institutions by redirecting money to green energy economies or serving as an inspiring, thought-provoking, or conversation-starting exemplar that others can look to as a model.

This might serve as a way of symbolically expressing and communicating a commitment to the legitimacy of justice institutions governing AAC in the future. It might encourage others to try out the same; effectively radiating out one’s influence. It could perhaps soften resistance to the perceived difficulties or losses associated with the prospect of reducing

AAC usage as the post-institutional context would require.

Certainly all of these types of behavior could be part of the duty to participate in the creation of just climate governing institutions, in varying degrees of instrumental and

132 symbolic power. However, compiling such a list is merely the tip of the iceberg as to understanding the complex moral topography of the duty to collectivize. Seeing this general catalogue of collectivizing activities helps shine light on an important element of the account of the duty, which I want to draw out in this section. I suggest that the duty to participate in the creation of just climate governing institutions should be conceived of as a duty to adopt the existence of just climate governing institutions as an end. I will sometimes refer to this as

“committing” or “showing commitment” to the end.9

Duties to adopt ends are a prominent part of our moral lives. A significant part of our duties in intimate relationships, for instance, are to adopt the flourishing of our friends, children or loved ones as parts of our project. Their good becomes something we aim at and which we incorporate into our practical deliberations and dispositions.10 A duty to adopt an end like this can be contrasted with a duty to do some discrete thing, though adopting an end might require discrete actions in specific contexts. For instance consider the difference between a duty to help keep the house clean and a duty to take out the trash. There are many

9 If one is familiar with Kant’s typography of duties, this will echo what he calls “imperfect” duties. As Kant means them, imperfect duties are of “wide” obligation and demand that we adopt indefinite maxims that commit us to ends. Given that for Kant the source of all of our duties is the fact that humanity in each person is an end in itself, whether our humanity or that of others, and in virtue of that we are obligated to “make the human being as such our end”, he thinks two such ends are obligatory; one’s own perfection and the happiness of others. The first generates duties to cultivate one’s natural perfection (i.e., one’s powers of mind, spirit, and body) as well as one’s moral perfection (i.e., one’s goodwill). The second generates the duty of beneficence. In order to have adopted the end of beneficence, for example, it is not true that at all times I need to be helping someone with her ends if I can. But it seems sometimes I must. See Kant, MM. For helpful taxonomies of Kantian duties see Allen Wood, “Duties to Oneself, Duties of Respect to Others,” in Thomas Hill, ed., The Blackwell Guide to Kant's Ethics (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) and Thomas Hill, “Imperfect Duties to Oneself,” in Andreas Trampota, Oliver Sensen, and Jens Timmermann, eds., Kant’s Tugendlehre (Boston: De Gruyter, 2013), p. 294, Thomas Hill, “Meeting Needs and Doing Favors”, in T. Hill Human Welfare and Moral Worth (Oxford: Clarendon, 2002), 201-243, (esp. pp. 203-5), Karen Stohr, “Kantian Beneficence and the Problem of Obligatory Aid,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 8 (2011), pp. 45-67 (esp. p. 50) and Allen Wood, Kant's Ethical Thought, p. 44. Robert Noggle’s recent take suggests that a duty to adopt an end commits someone to having a policy of or propensity toward “choosing actions that would promote the end and avoiding actions that would thwart it”. See his “Give Till It Hurts? Beneficence, Imperfect Duties, and a Moderate Response to the Aid Question,” Journal of Social Philosophy 40 (1) (2009): 1-16. 10 Generally when we genuinely adopt an end, our cognitive, attitudinal, affective, and behavioral dispositions are all affected. For instance, when we adopt the good of our friends as our end we feel joy at their successes and sympathize with their tribulations. I will focus mostly here on the behavioral element.

133 activities that are involved in keeping the house clean and doing any number of them can count as helping toward that end. It seems true that one could adopt as an end having a clean house, and help keep the house clean without ever taking out the trash (so long as one’s housemates did…). If, however, one lives alone or one’s housemate is recovering from surgery and unable to take the trash out taking out the trash might turn out to be a necessary part of truly adopting the end, which will also include many other things.

Moreover, it is unlikely that performing any one activity individually would be sufficient to demonstrate having adopted the end of a clean house. For example, if one reliably takes out the trash but never cleans the kitchen or bathroom it seems implausible to conclude that one has truly adopted having a clean house as an end. However, since there is always more one could do in order to keep the house clean, it seems there are limits on how much of it one could be required to do in order to count as having adopted having a clean house as one’s end, for instance cleaning the grout daily.

The duty to participate in the creation of just climate governing institutions makes sense as a duty more like the duty to adopt a friend’s flourishing as an end or duty to help keep the house clean than the duty to take out the trash. Like many social movements, and as evidenced above, there are many different things that one could do to participate. One is faced with navigating a rich possibility space in choosing activities to partake in that could count as fulfilling the duty by demonstrating that one has adopted, or is committed to, the end in question. The outcome of realizing the end (i.e., establishing just climate institutions) depends on many others doing a range of different kinds of activities that coordinate, facilitate, support, resonate with, etc. each other. Finding one’s place in such a movement doesn’t seem to have a step-by-step guide or rulebook. Just as there is no algorithm for figuring out how to adopt a friend’s flourishing as an end, participating in the creation of just

134 institutions seems to involve a lot of latitude and discretion on behalf of the individual agent in carving out a path, at least insofar as it is in service of integrating one’s commitments across the pre-institutional demands of distributive justice we face and the global institutions necessary manage AAC use and avert climate catastrophe.11 It seems that one could adopt the end of the existence of just climate institutions without doing some kinds of activities listed above, or even many of them. One might never write an op-ed, or march in the streets, but still count as being committed to the end by, for instance, donating significant income to lobbying efforts.

To an even greater degree than cleaning the house, the options for participating are functionally infinite and one could always do more, and so it seems there should be some limits on how much one could be required to do to count as having adopted the existence of just institutions as an end. While it would be hard to dispute that one would be committed to the existence of just climate institutions for doing so (even if we might have some criticism about prioritization), surely we need not be constantly phone-banking for a candidate with a promising climate platform, or petitioning for a successful non-profit. It seems that some kind of threshold must be in operation to determine what constitutes adopting the end.

Interpreting the duty of collectivize as a duty to commit to a certain kind of end, thus, leaves us with many questions regarding the satisfaction conditions of the duty. In the next two sections, respectively, I develop some resources for thinking through a ceiling on what could plausibly be required of one to count as having adopted the end and a floor past which one must certainly cross in order to plausibly count as having adopted the end. This however leaves significant room in between these two restrictions, so in Section Five, I try to further narrow our understanding of the demands of what could be required to constitute

11 As I will explore more below, circumstances can certainly narrow that latitude.

135 commitment to the end by giving an account that depends on historical, social, and material facts of individuals in question.

Section Three: Upper Limits on Requirements for Adopting the End

In this brief section I provide an argument for a principled upper limit, or ceiling, on what could be required as constituting commitment to the existence of justice climate governing institutions. Recall that in the previous chapter, with my disjunctive Lockean-

Kantian inspired account, I argued that individuals are required to restrict their use, or benefit from the use, of AAC to within a specified justifiable range. Though those restrictions may be rather drastic, I suggested that individuals were normatively protected against further reducing their AAC use because they are entitled to that range as a matter of achieving a threshold of secure and stable self-preservation (for the Lockean) or effective agency (for the Kantian). Requiring people to cut into that range would undercut central and morally vital baseline interests.

I think these argumentative resources suggest a similar upper limit for what could be required to satisfy the duty to collectivize. The moral value in achieving a threshold of secure and stable self-preservation or effective agency do not disappear. The duty to collectivize is meant in part to serve as a unifier of commitments between pre-institutional AAC use and the realization of global institutions of justice that are required to fairly govern AAC and avoid the moral problems associated with institutional vacuum, like catastrophic climate change. Adopting the existence of just climate governing institutions, certainly couldn’t require one to sacrifice the achievement of a threshold of secure and stable self-preservation or effective agency. To do so would self-undermine part of its purpose. Therefore I think we can be pretty confident in an upper limit on how demanding the duty to collectivize could be.

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I think it is important to remind ourselves of the morally vital interests to which everyone has an entitlement that undergird the disjunctive Lockean-Kantian inspired account from the previous chapter for another reason that merely pointing out what might have seemed like an intuitive upper limit anyway. It reminds us what is also at stake if we do not collectivize adequately and no collective institutions come into existence to mitigate catastrophic climate change. This is informative as we begin to unpack in the next two sections what all could be required in order to satisfy the duty to collectivize. It helps us to approach, with a critical eye, appeals to other kinds of moral values (as I catalogued briefly in the previous chapter, for instance pursuing luxuries, or satisfying mere preferences, or contributing to meaningful identity-shaping projects, etc.) as proposals for additional moral protections and limits on what could be required to count as having adopted the existence of just climate governing institutions as an end. In highlighting this, perhaps we can ward off demandingness objections that are in bad faith.

Section Four: Lower Bounds on Requirements for Adopting the End

The last section argued for the upper limit, or ceiling, on what the duty to collectivize could require. In this section I will try to locate the lower bounds, or floor, on what being committed to the existence of just climate institutions minimally requires. Whatever else the duty might require, it seems to demand at least this much.

There are a range of actions that intuitively give us very strong reason to conclude that someone hasn’t genuinely or adequately adopted the existence of just climate governing institutions as an end. For instance, when someone votes for a climate denier or spreads climate-denialism propaganda through their social media networks it is hard to take seriously the claim that they are committed to the existence of just climate institutions, even if this is nested within some other behaviors that might otherwise count in favor of having adopted

137 the end. This is particularly clear if done knowingly, but it also seems hard to maintain that someone who votes for a candidate that unbeknownst to them is a climate denier has actually adopted the end, for if they had they would be attuned to such policy platforms.12

These kinds of actions that should really be conceived of as participating in the undermining of the existence of just institutions and reveal that one has not satisfied the duty to collectivize. I do not think these duties should be particularly more controversial than a duty to not vote for David Duke or to not spread vile racial animosity. One simply cannot be taken seriously as committed to racial justice doing such things (similarly, even if these behaviors are nested with some others that do seem to advance racial justice).

Of course, even if one doesn’t violate the duty as above, if one failed to ever do any of the kinds of actions catalogued above that might plausibly be part of adopting then end, one would surely not count as satisfying the duty, absent extenuating circumstances such as if doing so would violate the principled upper limit established above by undermining someone’s stable and secure self-preservation or effective agency. This is true even if one satisfied one’s duty regarding AAC use established in the previous chapter by restriction one’s use to within the Lockean-Kantian range. While I mentioned above that AAC reductions can be part of one’s adopting the existence of just institutions as an end, it cannot be the whole of it because restricting one’s AAC is consistent with adopting the opposite end, perennial institutional vacuum.

Beyond the cases of active undermining and simple non-engagement, like the roommate who sometimes takes the garbage out but never cleans the bathroom or kitchen,

12 This would seem a form of culpable ignorance. It is conceivable, of course, that one could do these actions and still count as being committed to the end; vote for Trump but donate a billion dollars to the green climate fund but I do not think these kinds of fringe cases are particularly more interesting than doomsday permissions to kill someone to save the galaxy.

138 someone who does one thing here or there is unlikely to be sufficient to demonstrate commitment to the existence of just institutions. Merely voting for the candidate with the greener platform or ‘liking’ 350.org on Facebook, does not by itself seem sufficient to constitute fulfilling the duty, even if these are instances of action that are oriented toward and count as participating in the creation of just institutions, and therefore would be part of the evidence one has adopted the end if joined with other activity. Stopping one’s participation at this minimal participation smacks of mere tokenism rather than commitment.

This overall point mirrors what is commonly understood about, say, the duty of beneficence. Performing a few beneficent actions does not make one beneficent. As the saying goes, one swallow doesn’t make a summer.13 It doesn’t seem that the mere fact that a person sometimes, to some extent performs actions that promote the end, is sufficient to constitute having adopted the end and thereby fulfill the duty. It doesn’t reflect the seriousness of the pre-institutional normative demand on individuals to restrict their AAC use and the need for institutions of justice to clarify, govern, and enforce that demand so as to actually protect the vital interests of potential victims. The duty to collectivize should reflect this seriousness.

Unfortunately, as with the task of, say, determining what threshold one has to pass in order to count as beneficent, or how much one must do to count as appropriately taking on a friend’s flourishing into one’s own projects, there are no neat lines in what is positively

13 Thanks to Henry Richardson for reminding me that this colloquial expression comes from Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 2nd ed. trns. by Terence Irwin. (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co., 1999), 1098a19. It should not surprise that some language from the virtue tradition might surface here, as I suggested in Chapter Two, the account I am developing, along with the work in the previous chapter, can be used to redeem “virtue” language and ground an account of what acting virtuously would be in the climate realm.

139 required to count as having adopted the existence of just climate institutions as one’s end.14

Any figure that one comes up with seems arbitrary and likely to admit of exceptions. As neat and tidy as it would be, I do not think we can, taking a resource-based approach, simply say

“donate 10% of your income to institution building”, or perhaps taking a time-based approach “spend 5 hours a week volunteering”, or perhaps taking an effort-based approach

“put as much effort into institution building as one does a close relationship”, or “treat the duty to collectivize as an equal additional demand as the duty to reduce one’s AAC use”, etc.

While a useful organizing technique, the recent uptick in organizations, services, websites, and apps facilitating people to at least do something every day to resist the Trump administration, like make 5 scripted phone calls to representatives, could not survive scrutiny as providing a similar kind of threshold for the duty to participate in the creation of just climate institutions. Depending on who one is, an easy but significant or efficacious monthly action might evidence commitment sufficiently, without putting in much money, time, or effort.15

Lest one think that this should mean we could take an outcome-based approach to specify some threshold for what is required to adopt the end (after all, private acts such as simply praying doggedly for climate institutions is not good enough), that too has problems.

While it is important to consider what might be efficacious forms of participating as opposed to wasteful, redundant, obviously useless, well-intentioned but counter-productive,

14 For a recent article making this point in more detail see Andrew Forcehimes and Luke Semrau, “Beneficence: Does Agglomeration Matter?” Journal of Applied Philosophy 34 (3) 2017. 15 This isn’t to say that the profile of many individuals’ duties won’t be populated by a set of actions like signing a basic 350.org, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, or NRDC petition. Or registering support of a local divestment movement, carbon tax proposal, or renewable energy portfolio commitment and passing it along to one’s friends. Or calling or emailing or writing one’s representatives once a week imploring them to do more in the legislature. These are low cost actions that are within the power of most individuals without risk of pushing one below the threshold I spoke of above regarding maintaining a threshold of secure and stable self-preservation or effective agency so as to be obvious and appealing components of many people’s basic threshold to demonstrate commitment to the required end.

140 etc., forms of participation, an outcome-based threshold seems implausible. First, measuring one’s participatory role in successful collectivizing outcomes brings all the same kinds of problems as faced views trying to attributing harms to individuals that we surveyed in the second chapter. Second someone, for instance, who devoted their life working diligently on an important piece of climate-related legislation or corporate negotiation that ultimately fails to be realized wouldn’t count as having adopting the end, when it seems they should. To draw an analogy, if, despite my best efforts I fail to draw my best friend out of a depression, it is absurd to deny that I had adopted her flourishing as my end. Successful outcomes or norms of effectiveness just aren’t the most telling metric for having adequately adopted that end. But it isn’t just a matter of outcome luck, plenty of things may be known in advance not be the best or most efficient use of our capacity, but do well to express commitment to the end. To draw another analogy to a different duty to adopt an end, it doesn’t seem that we have to provide maximal benefit to targets of our beneficence to count as beneficent.16

Sorting through how demanding on one’s time, energy, or resources it might be to adequately commit to the end, or determining what discrete actions may be required, is largely a contextual affair.17 In order to not be reduced to a mere case by case assessment, in the following section, I suggest some general guidelines for tracking the demands on individuals to adequately adopt the end and fulfill the duty to collectivize, as well as individual’s protections against demands.

16 What I defend below about the overall system of people’s duties to collectivize having built in “redundancies” hopefully helps mitigate any sting of this concession. 17 One important general point to remember is that because the duty is a duty to adopt an end, the strength of the duty is rarely likely to interfere with other competing discrete duties. If one has to miss a rally to care for a sick child, there is so much give and take elsewhere in the system of what it is to adopt an end for the duty on the whole to be unaffected. Where some of the trickier considerations come in to play are with competition with other duties to adopt ends, or orient one’s life in a certain way, which if oriented around the right fundamental values (like protecting basic rights to self-preservation or effective agency), might be defensibly trade-off-able.

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Section Five: Guidance for Context Sensitive Requirements

For the task of navigating and narrowing the space between the upper and lower limits of the previous sections—and thereby in order to better determine how much is required to count as adopting the end and satisfying the duty to collectivize—we have to attend to historical, social, and material facts of individuals in question. Recall, I have argued above that everyone has the duty to participate in the creation of just climate governing activities because of both the need for their existence to prevent the moral problems of climate change and the fact that every individual faces a pre-institutional normative demand to restrict their AAC use that requires institutions to specify and make determinant.

However, people are situated very differently with respect to their abilities to participate in the creation of just institutions. For one, they occupy different positions with respect to the levers of political, economic, and social power to be used toward creating just institutions, including different skillsets. Moreover, the kinds of sacrifices individuals can make without suffering losses to their most vital interests vary widely. For instance the

Mongolian nomad and the Guatemalan migrant worker’s position are in stark contrast to the net-jet owning hedge fund manager. It would be deeply morally problematic to demand that these different figures are obligated to do the same things in service of creating just climate governing institutions simply because both have a pre-institutional demand facing them that cannot be fully satisfied without the existence of just climate governing institutions. Either it would demand far too much of the migrant worker, or, on the other hand, if we are careful that the obligation wouldn’t overly burden the farm worker but still insist that everyone is obligated to do the same thing it would under-burden the banker, leveling things down without meeting the cumulative requirements for creating just institutions. And so while

142 everybody has the duty, the satisfaction conditions for what it takes to sufficiently adopt the end will vary dramatically.18

I want to suggest three general metrics by which we should begin to characterize individuals in order to see what the profile of their duty to collectivize looks like. I consider how these metrics shed light on how demanding the profile of their duty to collectivize is.

Call this the “strength” of the duty. At the most general level, the higher one scores on a metric, the higher the standards are for what it takes to count as having adopted the end, and therefore satisfy the duty. But it also seems important to how these metrics might modulate what those demands should be directed toward, that is which particular forms of behavior or activism are better or worse to demonstrate commitment to the end. Call this the “shape” of the duty.19 The first metric looks at an individual’s AAC use. The second metric looks at an individual’s relative ability to effect change in institutional arrangements. The third metric looks at an individual’s membership in a solidaristic community of collectivizers.

AAC Use

To begin with the first metric, it seems plausible that the more AAC one uses (which isn’t used in service of securing others above the Lockean-Kantian threshold) the more demanding it would be to adequately adopt the existence of just institutions as one’s end.

18 Barbara Herman makes a similar point about the duty of mutual aid saying, “one should not confuse the uniformity of obligation (where all of a kind of rational being must have the same obligations) with the uniformity of what one is obliged to do (which will vary with the kind of circumstances picked out as morally relevant by the duty). See The Practice of Moral Judgment, p. 69. Here I am saying that everyone has the duty to collectivize, but satisfying it will require radically different things from certain individuals. 19 My account here draws inspiration from work by David Miller and Iris Marion Young. Both Miller and Young who I have drawn inspiration from above are oriented more squarely around strength and demandingness. See his book National Responsibility and Global Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 100-104. See Young’s papers “Responsibility and Global Justice”, “Responsibility and Global Labor Justice” The Journal of Political Philosophy, 12.4 (2004): 365-388, p. 384, and “From Guilt to Solidarity,” Dissent (2003): 39-44. She also works out these ideas in her Responsibility for Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). I also want to be clear that in this discussion, I am speaking only of duties to participate in the creation of just institutions and such criteria arise differently here than in the previous chapter on pre-institutional duties regarding the use, or benefit from the use, of AAC.

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There are two basic reasons for this. First, it is those who use the most whose AAC usage most needs to be governed by enforceable institutions. Second, as we saw in the previous chapter regarding how to prioritize disgorging AAC use among those above the Lockean-

Kantian threshold, high users are least likely to be giving up moral values comparable to the values realized in institutional capacity building. More demands on high users are more likely to cut into attaining certain luxuries or satisfying mere preferences than cutting into the threshold for secure and stable self-preservation or effective agency. On the other hand, for the nomad or farmworker it might be the case that using any resources toward the creation of just climate institutions would dip them below the Lockean-Kantian thresholds of secure and stable self-preservation or effective agency. In that case they would run up against the limit we raised above. For those individuals it is plausible that merely not actively undermining efforts at collectivizing, along with certain dispositions to do more if resources allowed it, might be enough to satisfy the duty.

It doesn’t seem that one’s position with respect to this metric would itself indicate particular forms of behavior over others to demonstrate that one has adopted the end (of course other norms or contextual facts may). AAC is an abstract but generic resource that everyone uses. This is important for generating the duty to restrict its use in the previous chapter, but that fact and the linear scale make it hard to see how it could have a multi- modal influence (affecting the strength and shape) on an individual’s profile. There is only one dimension in which one could differ from others; magnitude. This separates the first metric from the two which are to follow—facts about one’s powers/abilities and one’s community membership—which have multiple dimensions of content to differentiate individuals and therefore which do seem to carry with them some (potentially defeasible) weight in favor of certain forms of participation.

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Relative Power

The second central metric for characterizing the demands of anyone’s duty to collectivize, regards an individual’s relative ability to effect change in institutional arrangements. It seems intuitive that, again, the more ability and power one has the more plausible it is that the duty would demand that one exercise that power.20 So, for example, if an executive or legislator simply does just what the average citizen would have to do to count as being committed, they would be failing to properly acknowledge their uniquely powerful situation and fail to count as adequately committing to the existence of just climate governing institutions. The very same behavior can count as adequately adopting the end for one, but not for another. This is, first, simply because of the need for power to be productively wielded towards realizing a very difficult but morally important goal in averting catastrophic climate change. While both actions could be part of demonstrating that one has adopted the end, the stakes are higher, for instance, if a Senator casts a vote than an average citizen, or if a mayor introduces a local renewable energy standard. Second, there is often significant overlap between this and the first category, such that demanding more from those with significant ability to change institutional arrangements is, as a matter of course, very unlikely to threaten their most vital interests in the way that unabated climate change does to its potential victims, or in the way that placing more of the burden to create institutions of justice would on individuals like the migrant worker.

This point shouldn’t obscure or overlook an important lesson learned by social movements the world over about the necessity of escalating mass mobilization and

20 Miller and Young both include a similar metric in their multi-axis theories of responsibility. It is worth mentioning that this dimension is also similar to the theory sketched by Wenar, “Responsibility and Severe Poverty.”

145 grassroots organizing.21 Highlighting the greater individual abilities and powers of the wealthy, the socially connected, the law-makers, etc. is not to underappreciate that what it really takes for distributively just institutions to actually exist relies on the mass public engagement, validation, and authorization of everyday citizens.22 This is ultimately widely distributed and therefore constructed by widespread activism. Because this is how social movements operate, suggesting that those ranking high on the power metric have more demanding duties is emphatically not to the exclusion of demands on those involved in grassroots organizing.

Unlike the first metric, one’s position in various nexuses of power does seem to have the potential to modulate which particular forms of behavior or participation are better or worse to demonstrate commitment to the end and thereby modify the “shape” of the duty not just its “strength”. Terms like “power” or “ability” or “capacity” are complex notions with absolute and relative senses. They need not always be referring to a scale aimed at measuring the largest global contribution or difference-making. We can also think of these concepts in concrete, particularized contexts. Consider a couple of characters for a moment.

Consider a news or media producer who has capacity to choose to pitch more stories about

21 See for instance, famously, Gene Sharp’s, The Politics of Nonviolent Struggle, vols. 1&2, (Boston, MA: Porter Sargent Publishers, 1973) or more recently Srdja Popovic’s Blueprint for Revolutions (New York: Random House, 2015). 22 This is further a part of what makes distributively just institutions also procedurally just. One might of course suggest, given how dire the climate problem is, that we dispense with the need for procedural justice and just shoot for the existence of distributively just institutions, even if that is implemented in an authoritarian way. Even if we do that, the point still holds that in the real world the way successful massive institutional change and creation actually happens is through sustained mass engagement. On the other end, this also raises potentially very difficult questions regarding the blend of ideal and non-ideal theorizing I’m engaged in. For we can also ask about potentially trading off the aim of creating fully distributively just institutions for more procedurally just or more realistic or easily achievable institutions that are, say, 80% just. I cannot settle these very thorny issues here and have to make peace with the fact that the general features of this account should hold across different targets, whether they be the absolute ideal or a tempered down option constrained by further non-ideal considerations.

146 climate change and raise consciousness.23 Or an executive of a company or the producer or star talent of a film who might work into their contracts that projects be carbon neutral.24 Or a legislator with slightly different axes of power and privilege, who can stump for or introduce bills with climate-institutions at their core, or use soft-power with her influential colleagues to encourage the same. Or a college student who decides to join her university’s sustainability club and fossil fuel divestment campaign.

Each of these characters is uniquely situated with respect to their abilities and powers to effect change on institutional arrangements. And I think it is plausible that these facts can privilege certain conduct rather than alternatives that would be equally demanding.25 This isn’t to commit to the claim that one route might be wrong and indicate a violation of the duty whereas another would indicate fulfillment of it, but I do think that these factors can provide potentially strong reasons. The media persona has reason, given her skillset and access to broadcasting, to exert effort towards public education as part of adopting the end.

The executive may not be in a position to influence climate treaties, but can change a company and perhaps industry culture. The legislator has reason, in virtue of the

23 To see why this matters see how little news coverage climate change gets Kevin Kalhoefer, “How Broadcast Networks Covered Climate Change In 2016,” Media Matters, March 23, 2017, https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2017/03/23/how-broadcast-networks-covered-climate-change- 2016/215718. One might even consider photographers using their skills to document the dangers and open up conversation space about the necessary institutions to avoid them like Gary Braasch’s World View of Global Warming, accessed August 23, 2017, http://worldviewofglobalwarming.org/ or James Balog’s Chasing Ice, accessed August 23, 2017, https://chasingice.com/. 24 An example of how very particular situational facts might affect the shape of the duty, take Leonardo DiCaprio who has made climate education documentaries, donated more money than I ever will to climate causes, etc. (this is not so say that, given his position, he counts as being committed to the end). After he won his Oscar, DiCaprio gave a thoughtful speech about climate change. I do not want to come down on whether using the stage as an activist platform is required, but in the wake of the speech he received standard criticism from certain circles about hypocrisy because he has a large carbon footprint. Given that, I think it is plausible that he should publically zero out his footprint (and that of his productions) through offsets to help accomplish the task of getting uptake to his other activity participating in the creation of just climate governing institutions. In his context, that public display seems like it might be required to show commitment to the end, in light of skepticism. 25 I want to flag that I am not advocating for a view that, like Martino Traxler has explored, equalizes the burdens across capacities. The burden might be proportionately higher for those with more absolute power or higher AAC use.

147 bureaucratic position she is in, to pursue these legislative avenues rather than, say, a comparably demanding film footprint offsetting program. The point is not that doing something else would necessarily demonstrate failure to satisfy the duty, though it could.

Instead, it is to shine light on an interesting way in which accounting at a more fine-grained level to individuals’ powers and abilities can focus more and less plausible ways of showing commitment to the end.

Community Membership

I want to suggest one more general metric that can modulate the profile of an individual’s duty to collectivize. It is less familiar, more speculative, and more controversial than the first two because it indicates disadvantaged victims of unjust AAC practices26, but I want to suggest that membership in a threatened community at the frontlines of climate change can modulate one’s duty to collectivize, potentially increasing its demandingness.27

This broad claim echoes insights from the solidarity literature into how membership in a community with relevant interests could generate or modify certain kinds of duties.28

Scholars working on solidarity variously point to a number of plausible factors that may serve as the explanation for strengthened duties of various kinds within solidaristic communities; for instance possession of a shared sense of self-identification with a group,

26 As I will argue below, I actually think it has the potential to serve an interesting and unique role in homing in on a baseline for the demands of the duty to collectivize for those that score high on other metrics. 27 I am partly following the lead of David Miller and Iris Marion Young here. Miller thinks that one’s responsibility for addressing harms can be modulated by certain communal associations. See his National Responsibility and Global Justice. Young thinks that one’s responsibility for justice can be modulated by the “interest” one has in social, political, or economic structures changing or remaining the same. On her view this implicated the community of victims as well as those at the top of an injustice who have an interest in its perpetuation. See Young, “Responsibility and Global Justice”, p. 128. As Young puts it, those at the bottom share a responsibility to work together to improve their situation, even though they require to succeed the support of less-vulnerable people to pressure political or economic forces. Ibid., p. 129. 28 See, e.g., Ashley Taylor, “Solidarity: Obligations and Expressions,” Journal of Political Philosophy 23 (2) (2015): 128-145, Avery Kolers, “The Priority of Solidarity to Justice,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 31 (4) (2014): 420-433, and Tommie Shelby, “Foundations of Black Solidarity: Collective Identity or Common Oppression? Ethics 112 (2) (2002): 231-266.

148 common bonds and dispositions towards empathy within a group, networks of trust, reliance, and loyalty among community members, or even merely being subject to a common oppression. I am not going to defend or adopt a precise account of such features here, or adjudicate issues between various scholarly accounts, but I do consider my presentation of this metric continuous with that domain of inquiry.

The first reason to include this metric as an important companion to the others is an appeal to intuition. For instance, consider the Standing Rock tribe’s resistance to the

DAPL.29 If one’s community is threatened by climate change (or the activity leading to it, like coal mining, pipeline construction, fracking, etc.) and the community is joining together in resistance, I find it plausible to think that a member of the community who is otherwise similarly situated to a non-member (some rural youth in Idaho, e.g.) with respect to AAC use and power, may have more extensive demands to show that they’ve truly adopted the end, just in virtue of their membership in that community. The lived experience of members in such setting seems to be that of an increased demand on behalf of justice.30

The second reason for this metric’s inclusion is that securing the interests of such communities is essential to the process of creating just climate institutions and the members of such communities are likely the best representatives of those interests. There is good reason as a matter of respect, empowerment, and self-determination that the organizing at the front lines of many climate change battles, while incredibly demanding, precisely should

29 I think this example is indicative of various Indigenous resistance movements around the globe that could be given similar analysis (for some other examples see Indigenous Environmental Network, accessed August 23, 2017, http://www.ienearth.org/). 30 While of course this isn’t authoritative, for an inspiring expression of this, see slain activist Berta Caceres’ acceptance speech for the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize for her work in Honduras with COPINH (https://copinh.org), accessed August 23, 2017, http://www.goldmanprize.org/recipient/berta-caceres/ or see Irene Ruiz, “Indigenous people are stabilizing the global climate,” DM, accessed August 23, 2017, http://www.dw.com/en/indigenous-people-are-stabilizing-the-global-climate/a-38809613.

149 be local.31 Given the realities of many of the battlegrounds for climate justice, this inevitably implicates disadvantaged populations and may demand a lot from them.

One might be concerned that including this metric to inform the profile of one’s duty to collectivize is too derivative to warrant inclusion. Sure, one might think, communal bonds of solidarity might adjust one’s duty, but so could things like making a promise, identifying as a radical environmentalist, or manifold other such normative identities or commitments we’ve taken up, which (even if true) hardly deserves a mention here. While it is true that in proposing this metric I am suggesting that the duty to participate in the creation of just institutions, in a way, takes on the force of these community bonds when the community is facing climate relevant stakes, in addition to the above reasons offered I think it is worth including as a general metric because these memberships are largely non-voluntary and foisted upon us rather than a matter of individual decision.32

I want to be very clear that including this metric is not in lieu of, or to the exclusion of, significantly more demanding duties on those who are significantly more privileged and powerful.33 Moreover, while this metric can implicate those who are disadvantaged, of course the principled limit on the demandingness of the duty to collectivize defended above holds

31 See, e.g., Developments in the Law Collection, “The Double Life of International Law: Indigenous Peoples and Extractive Industries,” Harvard Law Review 129 (6) (2016): 1755. 32 If one accepts that such individuals might have more demanding duties, one might also think that rather than modulating the duty to collectivize these considerations instead indicate independent duties that point in a similar direction. I do not have a full account of when it is felicitous to count various duties as part of the same duty and when they need to be individuated, but I am inclined to be lenient with enforcing boundaries especially in cases of duties to adopt ends, where so much can count as partial fulfillment of adopting the end. Such duties are by nature Borg-like, to steal an analogy, and we should just take care to not lose sight of what is being incorporated (which I think I have successfully done). To go back to a similar analogy we’ve been dealing with above, consider the general duty to clean up after oneself. If my roommate’s partner comes over a lot and uses the house, kitchen, etc., it makes sense that she might have some duties to clean up after herself. My roommate also seems to have the general duty to clean up after himself. However, his is much stronger than hers around the house. It doesn’t seem than it’s just that they both share one duty and then he also shares a separate duty of solidarity, as a housemember or roommate that also points towards cleaning up. I think it is much more intuitive to think that what the duty to clean up after oneself is or amounts to in context is different in virtue of status as a guest or as a roommate. It context it isn’t just that they align, but they attach and one is made meaningful by the other. 33 This point will become even clearer in the next section.

150 sway. So these solidaristic communal associations couldn’t demand that one become the next Berta Caceres, the slain Honduran environmental activist, to count as having adopted the existence of just climate institutions as one’s end.34

As I suggested of the second metric above, this third metric also plausibly seems able to modify the shape of the duty to collectivize as well, not merely its strength, privileging certain conduct rather than alternatives that would be equally demanding. Again, this isn’t to defend the claim that one route might be wrong and indicate a violation of the duty whereas another would indicate fulfillment of it, but I do think that these factors can provide potentially strong reasons. A member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe has more reason to participate in the communal protests rather than, say, a comparably demanding private letter- writing campaign to demonstrate commitment to the existence of just climate institutions.

Accepting this does, as indicated above, commit one to the idea that optimizing one’s outcome is not the regulative ideal for adopting the existence of just climate governing institutions as one’s end. For reasons articulated above, I find this plausible.

In virtue of having multiple criteria by which to characterize individuals in order to better clarify the profile of their duty to collectivize, we invite the inevitability of significant conflict.35 It is clear that these various metrics will not always all align and some criteria might indicate that the bar for the duty to collectivize should be high, others might indicate

34 It is an interesting aspect of these cases whereby the activism can come to serve as meaningful identity- shaping projects. This fact may serve to dampen the perceived demand of intense participation. 35 In fact quantifying people’s position on any one of these metrics is difficult in its own right and surely subject to controversial interpretations. Even still it would be easier to have one single metric, however I think doing so does not capture the intuitions above adequately once we’ve been exposed to the possibilities coming from the other metrics as argued above. One of the main advances from standard treatments of the so-called “polluter pays principle”, “beneficiary pays principle”, or “ability to pay principle” which have been at the center of many discussions of allocating climate responsibility I see in Miller and Young’s pictures which I draw inspiration from is that they incorporate the intuitive insights from many different methods for apportioning responsibility but allow for a more nuanced analysis by recognizing all of them in one theory to be balanced, rather than parochially focusing on only one metric, dimension, or principle to allocate responsibility. This, while complex, messy, and ambiguous seems better fit to the phenomena of moral life than forcing everything onto one artificially unified scale.

151 the opposite. For instance, the average middle-class American ranks highly in the global scheme of AAC use, but lacks individual power in significant ways. A simple living politician might rank low on the AAC use and community membership metrics but high on the power or ability metric. Similarly, Standing Rock tribe members might rank high on the community membership metric but rather low on the other two. If the cases I have made are plausible then ranking highly on any one of the metrics can be sufficient to indicate a demanding duty, even if ranking highly in two or all three might indicate an even stronger duty.

We may of course try to find some function to combine or weigh the various metrics into a single index (like the HDI, for example). However, I am not optimistic about the likelihood of locating a compelling exceptionless weighting or ranking principle that delivers the intuitively right judgment about who has to do more to count as adopting to the existence of just climate institutions as one’s end. The complexity and ambiguity intrinsic to maintaining multiple metrics reflects the messy phenomena that form the substance of moral life.

That said, I do think there is one suggestive feature of joining these three metrics. If it is plausible that the community membership metric can significantly increase the demands on otherwise significantly disadvantaged populations like the members of Standing Rock whose solidaristic community interfaces with the absence of just climate institutions, I think it can help arrive at baseline for the demands of the duty to collectivize for those that score high on one or more other metrics. However demanding one’s duty to collectivize can be, on the basis of a high score on the community membership metric (for an otherwise unprivileged, vulnerable, potential victim of climate injustice, like members of the Standing

Rock tribe), I suggest that those who score high on at least one of the other metrics and are more privileged and less vulnerable to threat inherit a duty to collectivize at least as

152 demanding. They certainly have fewer grounds for demandingness objections that aren’t in bad faith. They also seem to have less claim to bearing an unfair burden than the disadvantaged. This doesn’t provide us with a full or neat account of the duty, but I think it can provide another range of important constraints.

Section Six: Redundancy

With the beginnings of a framework for thinking through how to characterize individuals in order to give a profile of their duty to collectivize, we are situated to expose another important element of this kind of duty. In this section I argue that we should not think of each individual’s duty to participate in the creation of just climate governing institutions as some finite percentage of the total effort required for their creation, like apportioning “wedges of a pie”. The duty should not be conceived as if, taking the lesson from the above metrics which modulate the strength and shape of the duty, W has to do

25% of the activity required to build the necessary institutions, X has to do 15%, Y has to do

50%, and Z has to do 10%.36 Instead, we should be comfortable with the prospect that if everyone did what, for their own profile, modulated by the above metrics, would constitute being committed to the end of just climate governing institutions it might in total be more than was strictly necessary to create them. That is to say, we should be comfortable with the overall network or system of duties to participate in the creation of just climate governing institutions having built in redundancies.

36 While the duty is, as I understand it, a duty of distributive justice (in virtue of the source of the problem generating the need for the institutions the duty aims to create), it is a mistake to think of it as “distributive” in this sense. I think a number of scholars fall prey to this kind of language. Among others who speak of fair share divisions of duties, for instance Martino Traxler speaks this way in ‘‘Fair Chore Division for Climate Change,” as he tries to defend a “chore division into equally burdensome shares”, p. 102. Likewise, Liam Murphy talks about one’s “contribution to the total compliance effect” of an idealized principle of beneficence in Moral Demands in Non-Ideal Theory, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 82.

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There are a number of reasons for this. To begin, there are significant epistemic barriers to knowing how much and what kind of activity will be necessary to build the institutions of justice capable of mitigating climate catastrophe and adapting to that which can’t be mitigated. Simply put, we do not have a vision of what the “pie” would look like in order to distribute and figure out what “wedge” each person is responsible for. For one, the institutions might be nearer or further away with fewer or more roadblocks than we can anticipate. But this epistemic limitation is rooted in an even deeper problem with trying to apportion out some percentage of the total activity required to create just climate institutions.

Recall in the last chapter I raised the issue of “multiple realizability” and argued that there are likely multiple, mutually justifiable interpretations of AAC distribution—and therefore institutional arrangements informed by them—that would satisfy either the central governing norms of secure and stable self-preservation for the Lockean or a threshold of effective agency for the Kantian. Moreover, there are likely multiple pathways to the creation of each such option for institutional arrangement with different areas of emphasis. For example, placing the primary emphasis on a media campaign might result in the same location as placing primacy on lobbying policy-makers directly. It seems we have multiple pathways to multiple options.

The amount of activity required to reach any specific outcome is highly path dependent and cannot be delimited in advance. Part of the whole problem of being in a pre- institutional setting is that the mechanisms do not exist to coordinate emphasis on some options or pathways rather than the others. Constructing just climate institutions is an essentially creative enterprise. The process of getting there is dynamic and iterative, responsive to feedback. There are going to be false starts. Some efforts are inevitably going

154 to be duplicated and yet others might be in competition, but that is the state of play in the pre-institutional setting. The “wedges of a pie” model tries to force a neatness on the messy pre-institutional setting that doesn’t admit of it. To use an analogy, the task has to be to supersaturate the whole pre-institutional context so that the structure that comes with institutions can crystallize.37

The way forward in such a context, given how significant and urgent the impending climate catastrophe is without suitable institutions, is to allow ourselves to be comfortable with the idea that the context-sensitive assignment of what constitutes commitment to the existence of just climate governing institutions has built in redundancies. If more activity than is strictly necessary to create the institutions of justice actually occurs, the best case scenario is that the transition happens quicker and with more unanimity than we may have anticipated. It is, however, possible that this results in some wasted time, resources, and effort. This is an unfortunate possibility. However, given predictable non-compliance, though, the built in redundancy in the assignment of duties is not likely to produce massive wasted effort in action. I will discuss noncompliance further in the next section, but people frequently fail to fulfill their duties, and unfortunately we have years of inductive experience that this is especially true with respect to climate change. What redundancy at the level of the overall system during the process of assigning duties to individuals allows is to ensure the moral currency to condemn in the case of joint failure.38 If people are even somewhat more

37 Thanks to Maggie Little for this imagery. 38 Consider a related case involving a crucial contested national election. The contrast between the candidates is stark. One is a neo-fascist. The other has a platform embodying the ideal institutions of justice. A bare majority is needed to elect the ideal justice candidate. And assume that if elected the winner will, through the magic of media spin, effectively have a “mandate” and be able to implement the vision. I think it is plausible to say that more than 51% of voters have an obligation to vote for the ideal-justice candidate (with the task of then identifying which 51% of the population that is), even though that is all that is required to win the election and thereby create the institutions of justice. In this context, it seems implausible to me that one could count as committed to the existence of just institutions without voting for the justice candidate (absent mitigating circumstances, which surely do not apply to 49% of the voting population). If true, this means there is some (normative) redundancy built into the system. But that seems exactly right given the stakes and the uncertainty

155 likely to act upon duties they take themselves to have at an initial distribution than to “pick up the slack” of non-compliers, the likelihood of non-compliance can serve as another argument for the kind of redundancy I’ve offered without having to come back to people for secondary, tertiary, etc. duties that arise because others fail to do their initial distribution of duties (which, given human psychology, is likely to cause resentment and defiance at perceived unfairness).

Importantly, avoiding the “wedges of a pie” model and accepting the idea about built in redundancies at the level of the system is not to say that there cannot be limitations on what the duty to participate in the creation of just climate governing institutions can require.

Emphatically there are. It is just that those limitations won’t be settled in virtue of dividing up and distributing wedges of the total amount of institution-creating activity that is required to solve the moral problem. They will be determined independently by referencing either the in principle limit I defended in Section Three above or the interpretation of what constitutes commitment to the end, given one’s profile under the metrics I have suggested modulate the duty’s strength and shape.

Section Seven: Noncompliance

To bring the account of the duty to participate in the creation of just climate governing institutions to a close, in this section I want to draw out a point that is partially implicit in what has been presented above regarding how sensitive this duty is to the non-

around how others may vote or whether they’ll stay home. In the real world, of course, things are even more complicated because margin of victory might adjust how policy gets shaped and the defeat of the neo-fascist depends on more than merely a bare majority. We need to resoundingly communicate the unacceptability and defeat of the fascist. The chaotic pre-election task, it seems, is to create a context for the realization of justice after the election and the potential for surpassing what is strictly necessary just is part of the game. For a potentially sympathetic view see Luke Maring, “Debate: Why Does the Excellent Citizen Vote?” Journal of Political Philosophy 24 (2) (2016): 245-257.

156 compliance of others.39 For while we may know how serious the impending climate catastrophe is that generates the need for just climate governing institutions, like any goals that require input from many nodes, as mentioned above, there is bound to be non- compliance with the duty, given our non-ideal world. Until there are institutional mechanisms to deter non-compliance, which is precisely what we are lacking in the pre- institutional setting, non-compliance will be a problem.40 I argue here that the duty to collectivize as conceived above is fairly, though not in principle, insensitive to the compliance of others after we have settled an initial account of everyone’s duties.

There are three possibilities for how the non-compliance, and hence wrongdoing, of others might affect one’s own duty to participate in the creation of just climate governing institutions.41 One’s duties might be unchanged from the requirements under an assumption of full compliance, and hence be compliance-insensitive.42 They might decrease by some degree

(i.e., become less demanding) because it is unfair or futile to be asked to do certain things if others do not.43 Or they might increase by some degree (i.e., become more demanding), indicating the importance of picking up the slack.44 The last two options would show the duties to be compliance-sensitive just in different directions.

39 David Miller highlights the importance of this issues in Justice for Earthlings: Essays in Political Philosophy, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), Ch. 9. 40 I am not here trying to solve the problem of how to reduce or eliminate non-compliance. 41 Ibid., p. 210. 42 Liam Murphy defends this view in chapter 5 of his Moral Demands in Non-Ideal Theory. There is actually a slightly stricter version which requires that individuals do the best possible action in circumstances of non- compliance on the condition that overall cost is not higher than they would have faced in full compliance so what’s required might change, but not the demandingness. Miller also plumbs for essentially this kind of view, one that is compliance insensitive, with some exceptions. 43 David Miller calls this “grouching” and entertains one possibility of reducing one’s burden to the average burden undertaken under the non-compliance scenario (see Justice for Earthlings, p. 211). See also Miller, “Taking up the Slack?” 44 Simon Caney defends this kind of view with respect to climate change, specifically, in his “Cosmopolitan Justice, Responsibility, and Global Climate Change,” Leiden Journal of International Law 18(4) (2005): 747-775. See also his chapter “Climate Change and Non-Ideal Theory: Six Ways of Responding to Noncompliance” in Clare Heyward & Dominic Roser (eds.), Climate Justice in a Non-Ideal World. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 21-42. The whole anthology is useful.

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If one thinks that the duty is compliance-sensitive (in either direction, to whatever degree), one would want to be careful to trace the residue from the initial make-up of duties.

We would need to track what Miller calls “primary” and “secondary” responsibilities (and if extended over significant amounts of time we might have other levels of constant adjustment and feedback given compliance, noncompliance, over/under achievement).45

Those that fail to fulfill their initial basket of duties would of course be morally at fault. As

Miller puts it nicely, “responsibility…remains with the non-complying members”.46 This is true whether others were to pick up the slack or not, although the moral failing is quite distinct between the cases. If others were to pick up the slack, such that the moral problem is solved, the non-compliers would not get off scot-free. It would still the case that the non- compliers violated their duties, even if no harm came from it.47 The normal bevy of moral and emotional responses appropriate to free-riding would seem appropriate, but they would not have the extra stain of victims associated with one’s free-riding. Additionally, if the duty were compliance-sensitive those who were to pick up the slack would be differently situated from those who simply did their original duty. We couldn’t think of this as supererogation

(going beyond the call of duty), because the fact of noncompliance by some would, on this view, literally shoulder others with new, albeit “secondary”, duties to pick up the slack

(because the moral problem is so serious, and failure isn’t an option). But at the same time, those that go beyond their pre-non-compliance assignment of duties would warrant some special normative evaluation, and perhaps additional praise. On the other hand, if others were to not pick up the slack, the initial non-compliers would bear “primary” responsibility and the

45 Miller, “Taking up the Slack”, p. 225. 46 Ibid., p. 220. 47 This is akin to how people that violate the rights of others or expose others to reckless risk, like the lucky drunk-driver, have done wrong even if no harms are realized.

158 others who failed to step up would bear “secondary” responsibility for the failure.48 The range of moral and emotional responses that attend to primary and secondary failings would likely be different, though not in any neatly generalizable form. If secondary failures were particularly easy to avoid, those people might deserve just as strong of condemnation as the primary bearers.

As has been argued by others, there are cases in which each of the three alternatives

(whereby duties increase, remain the same, or decrease in the face of noncompliance) seem plausible.49 It will seem plausible that some duties might increase when, for instance, significant harms could be avoided at little to no cost to some individuals if they picked up the slack from other’s non-compliance. For instance imagine some community trying to eradicate a deadly flesh-eating disease ravaging the workers. Assume the fair distribution of duties to do this requires each of ten billionaires to contribute $1,000,000. If one of them decides to slough off, it seems transparent that one or more of the other 9 billionaires, who unlike the rest of the community would barely notice the cost, need to step in, thereby increasing the demand of some duties in virtue of non-compliance.50

To suggest a case where it is plausible that some duties remain unchanged, Laura

Valentini imagines someone who has decided to spend five hours per week campaigning for

48 Miller himself thinks that only the primary duty failures are failures of justice; secondary are not, even if they imply moral fault and sanction blame (Ibid., p. 222). I cannot see any way to maintain this distinction. He thinks duties of justice imply enforceability by third parties. It is not clear this is a defensible criteria (see Allen Buchanan, “Justice and Charity,” Ethics 97 (3) (1987): 558-575), but even if it were, there is not sufficient reason to think that secondary failings couldn’t be enforced by third parties. 49 Valentini, “Ideal vs. Non-ideal Theory: A Conceptual Map.” Here Valentini ultimately settles on a view that one must “do what is reasonably within [one’s] power to respond to existing injustices” (p. 656). This itself doesn’t settle whether duties increase, decrease, or stay the same. It would all rest upon a contentful interpretation of what is ‘reasonable’. 50 Assume everyone else in the community is squarely working class and there are no multi-millionaires that could also step in. Though even if there were also 10 people with $100 million who could also put in $100K without notice, while we might not have established that the billionaires duties increase, the case still proves the point that *some* duties can increase given noncompliance, whether the billionaires or multi-millionaires isn’t essential for proving that point.

159 some institutional reform against poverty. Assume that fulfills his initial duty. If everyone else also put in five hours per week on the same institutional reform, it would occur very quickly. Unfortunately, the real need to get a quick institutional response is for many people to get involved, not one person spending 10 or 15 or 20 more hours a week on it. It seems plausible that without a massive influx of bodies, continuing to be part of the slower reform by chipping away 5 hours at a time would still satisfy his duty.

Finally, it will seem plausible that some duties can decrease given non-compliance, for instance when the desired outcome is so far away as to be virtually certain to be unattainable, such that doing one’s initial duty is pure cost. Valentini gives a case about Jason who “knows that a political activist in his society, Luc, is about to be unjustly incarcerated.

He also knows that, if enough people join him in protest, the sentence will be revoked.

Unfortunately, none of his fellow citizens intends to do his or her fair share of protesting.

Under these circumstances, it is not obvious that Jason still ought to protest. Ex hypothesi, doing so would have no impact on Luc’s incarceration, and would only generate hostility against Jason.”51 Perhaps there is expressive value in voicing one’s conscience, or value in keeping clean hands, but even if so it seems permissible to do so in an alternative way that doesn’t risk the demands of injury and arrest, like writing an op-ed, contributing to lawyer funds, etc. If that is the case, we have reason to believe that duties can become less demanding from noncompliance in certain circumstances.

Gesturing at these kinds of cases suggests that there is likely not a general answer, and we have to do some digging for the context of duties to participate in the creation of just climate governing institutions, where I think there is good reason to conceive of the

51 Valentini, “Ideal vs. Non-ideal Theory,” pp. 656.

160 duty as fairly compliance-insensitive once we have settled an initial account of everyone’s duties.

To see why, recall the account of the duty thus far. I have argued both that we should reject the “wedges of a pie” model, and accept that the initial distribution of duties in the overall network or system of duties to participate in the creation of just climate governing institutions will have built in redundancies.

Once we have that view it seems largely unnecessary to complicate the story with claims about compliance-sensitivity in either direction for most average individuals after they have an initial interpretation of what adopting the end adequately would require. Of course some (perhaps many) ordinary individuals will not do what constitutes commitment to the existence of just climate governing institutions. But if the initial determinations for what counts as being committed to that end are extensive enough in the way I have suggested such that under conditions of full compliance it would amount to more total agential activity than would have been strictly required to create the institutions (given the urgent necessity of creating the institutions, the uncertainty around what’s all together is required to do so, etc.) then we need not consider it “picking up the slack” for others that do not comply, but instead just doing what one was initially required to do. There is already the necessary redundancy built into the interpretation of what counts as being committed to the end to require going to deeper layers after noncompliance. It is baked in from the start, or settled upstream, we might say.

I have tempered my language by suggesting that the duty should be conceived of as

“fairly” compliance-insensitive after the initial interpretation of would constitute commitment to the end. I do not want to completely rule out the possibility in case we were wrong, overly conservative, too accommodating to demandingness objections, etc. If there is

161 going to be any compliance sensitivity of the type I have presented above that the literature focuses on (adjusting the demandingness of the duty after the preliminary interpretation) I think it is much more likely for people with very significant social, material, and political power to take on more of a burden in the context of widespread non-compliance. Those are the privileged figures who are simultaneously most likely to make a difference individually through their collectivizing behavior and furthest away from sacrificing the most morally vital interests in being asked to do more and therefore have least cause for complaint.

However, again, that demographics’ initial distribution is much more extensive, so I would have to be convinced that the same story shouldn’t be told about all of the heavy-lifting happening in the initial requirements for counting as committed to the end.

If there is compliance-sensitivity in that others have to pick up the slack, the degree to which secondary duties are created will again depend on context-sensitive features.

Likewise, the moral-emotional responses for primary and secondary failures (once we were to establish them) will likely differ depending on fine-grained analysis of differential assignment of responsibility. Secondary failures, for the empowered and privileged might warrant stronger condemnation than secondary failures of victims. Conversely, secondary fulfillment might deserve more praise for the disempowered than for similar picking up of the slack by the rich and powerful.

If there is going to be compliance sensitivity that we would need to account for, in the wake of the initial interpretation of individuals’ duties, I think it is likely to most centrally be about what kinds of actions one should undertake as part of their commitment to the end, rather than how demanding it is to be so committed; that is, the “shape” of the duty, rather than the “strength” of it. This is because while the normative over-determination thesis will likely have already stretched the demandingness of the duty significantly far, it may

162 only be after the fact of the initial interpretation of duties that certain obvious, or recognizable wasteful redundancies or gaps in collectivizing activities emerge from non- compliance patterns. If these do begin to appear, then it does seem sensible that one might have to adjust where to put one’s efforts so as to count as committed. Now, the strength of the duty may gradually decrease as the existence of just institutions becomes nearer and nearer a reality. And while this will be affected by how many people comply with their initial duty’s profile, it is not the same kind of compliance sensitivity in the literature, which focuses on what happens when people don’t comply with an initial distribution of duties.

Instead this would be a kind of compliance sensitivity tailored to my view about what happens when people do comply with an initial distribution of duties that under full compliance would amount to more total agential activity than would have been strictly required to create the institutions.

Finally, if it were to become clear that necessary climate governing institutions were too far away and they were unrealizable, it is conceivable that the literature’s standard notion of compliance sensitivity could diminish the duty to participate in the creation of just climate governing institutions and shift toward something more like a duty to rescue as a way of integrating one’s commitments to distributive justice given those hypothetical empirical realities.52 In our current context, though, I think this abandonment is irresponsibly hasty.

There is some measure of momentum toward responsible climate policy and institutions,

52 In less dire times, when the creation of institutions is not understood to be impossible, I am open to the idea that there could be a similar shift toward duties of rescue for some people. However, given the feasibility and supreme moral importance of the existence of institutions in mitigating climate catastrophe, such a shift might not be appropriate, for example, for law and policy-makers or celebrities and media personnel who could play a galvanizing, communicative role (I would also need convincing that this shift toward duties of rescue would really be warranted by some average individuals, regardless of how ‘far’ away we are from realizing the institutions). They might instead have to do more to count as discharging their collectivization duties. Recognizing the value of norms of efficiency (of time, money, material-, social-, intellectual capital, etc.) very plausibly, depending on one’s context, can result in a duty profile balanced strongly towards institution creation. And this kind of contextual adjustment is true more generally about the shape of one’s duty given non-compliance, not just in the case of shifting to duties of rescue.

163 both in getting the UNFCCC to its current status and looking to local governments, NGOs, etc. It isn’t so alien or inconceivable that continually ratcheted up commitments, and enforcement mechanisms will layer into the framework.

Concluding Remarks

In this chapter I have defended an account of the individual duty to participate in the creation of just climate institutions, what I also called the duty to collectivize, by first presenting two distinct but mutually supporting justifications for such a duty. I argued that this duty is most essentially a duty to adopt a certain kind of end. While I suggested a floor past which one must certainly cross in order to plausibly count as having adopted the end and a ceiling on what could plausibly be required of one to count as having adopted the end, the requirements for demonstrating that adoption depend on historical, social, and material facts of individuals in question. I suggested three central metrics by which we should begin to characterize individuals in order to see what the profile of their duty to collectivize looks like. I further argued that we should not think of each individual’s duty to participate in the creation of just climate governing institutions as some finite percentage of the total agential effort required for their creation, like apportioning “wedges of a pie”. Instead, suggested that if everyone actually did what, according to their profile, would constitute sufficiently adopting the end it would amount to more total agential activity than would have been strictly required to create the institutions. I ended the chapter by raising considerations about these duties regarding the prospect of non-compliance by others, arguing that in our context, it is unlikely that collectivization duties of the shape I have argued for will be defeated by the non-compliance of others.

With this I hope to have completed the process of unifying a number of different theoretical elements pre- and post-institutionally for an adequate account of climate morality

164 within a particular kind of theory of distributive justice. While of course there are many more details that could and should be further explored, we now have filled out a theory which simultaneously recognizes and emphasizes the importance of collective institutions, captures the distribution of collective institutional responsibility in light of distributive shares of AAC and the permissions, rights, and duties that attach to those, and explains pre-institutional responsibilities and their relationship to collective institutional responsibility (both regarding the use of AAC and creation of just institutions).

Moreover, as I suggested would prevail in Chapter Two, we now have a way of redeeming much of the language of the complicity theorist, virtue theorist, as well as the initially broad and abstract language in the Humanity Formulation. This distributive justice theory provides an account of what “problematic participation” would consist in, in order to recover plausible language about “complicity” in the climate context, if one so desires to meaningfully use it. Likewise, it gives a way of explaining and grounding out what counts as virtuous or vicious in the climate domain. Similarly, if one is very keen to use the language, this distributive justice account gives a way of interpreting how individual behavior could fall broadly under the headings of not adequately respecting others’ autonomy and not being something that others can rationally consent to.

Climate change poses significant difficulties to moral theory, but I have attempted to develop a promising account of climate morality. The unfortunate news is that whatever theoretical difficulties I have successfully shed or made progress on, we are left with an immeasurably more difficult challenge…live up to and enact this vision.

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