Published December 18, 2019 | Version v1
Journal article Open

Cosmopolitanism and the Climate Crisis

Creators

  • 1. Univ. Ohio

Description

As awareness of global warming has spread during the past couple of decades and developed into the realization that humanity faces an existential threat, a number of more or less Kantian liberal or cosmopolitan moral and political theorists have attempted to address questions of justice raised by the climate crisis. David Held was among the most prolific and influential of them. Here I discuss Held's cosmopolitan perspective on climate governance and consider its bearing on certain recent proposals for new institutions, including in particular a proposal offered by John Broome and Duncan Foley for establishing a World Climate Bank (WCB). I argue that such a WCB may be endorsable from Held's perspective, depending how the initial proposal may get further developed. Held's approach to politics is similar to Kant's in certain significant respects, including the role of hope. Both approaches are valuable and important in relation to the climate crisis. 

Notes

Alyssa R. Bernstein is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ohio University, USA, where she has been teaching since 2002. Her articles on the political philosophies of Immanuel Kant and John Rawls have appeared in various academic journals, including Kantian Review and Jahrbuch für Recht und Ethik (Annual Review of Law and Ethics), as well as in several edited volumes. She is the author of six extensive and mutually cross-referenced encyclopedia articles on moral and political cosmopolitanism, John Rawls's political philosophy, and climate justice, in Springer's online, open-access Encyclopedia of Global Justice. Her recent articles include: "No Justice in Climate Policy?" in Ethics and Global Climate Change: Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Volume XL (2016), and "Civil Disobedience: Towards a Kantian Conception" in Kant's Doctrine of Right in the Twenty-first Century, eds. L. Krasnoff, N. Sánchez Madrid, and P. Satne (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2018).

Files

Files (179.7 kB)

Name Size Download all
md5:f913202ff2d97c4445918e945f2b52c1
179.7 kB Download