Abstract
Within the climate justice debate, the ‘beneficiary pays’ principle holds that those who benefit from greenhouse emissions associated with industrialization ought to pay for the costs of mitigating and adapting to their adverse effects. This principle constitutes a claim of inter-generational justice, and it is widely believed that the non-identity problem raises serious difficulties for any such claim. After briefly sketching the rationale behind ‘beneficiary pays,’ this paper offers a new way of understanding the claim that persons in developed societies have benefited from industrialization. It argues that when we think of the claim in this new way, it evades the non-identity problem entirely. Some objections to this approach are then considered and rebutted. The paper concludes by comparing the present, relatively modest solution to the nonidentity problem with a much more ambitious attempt from the recent literature.
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Notes
Briefly, the non-identity problem arises in trying to reconcile two conflicting intuitions about morality. The first is the ‘person-affecting’ intuition: in order for an act to be morally bad, the act must be bad for some person. The second is that some acts that adversely affect mere ‘future persons’ –those that do not currently exist– are nevertheless morally bad. See Parfit (1984: 351ff.). For recent discussion of the connection to problems of intergenerational justice, see Cohen (2009), Kamm (2002), and Sher (2005).
There is another way of interpreting the non-identity problem, which recognizes such comparisons as meaningful, but holds that since never having existed is a state with neutral value, any life worth living is better (to the person living it) than never having existed at all. See Broome (1999: 166ff.) for some critical discussion of the concept of a life worth living.
Some recent defences of the position include Page (1999), Neumayer (2000), Shue (1999), Gosseries (2004), and Meyer and Roser (2010). For further criticism, see Caney (2006) and Schussler (2011). For a discussion of the related idea that wealthy countries have incurred a ‘climate debt’ toward poor countries, see Pickering and Barry (2012).
Arguably, a further implication of Beneficiary Pays is that priority be given to extending the benefits of development to individuals residing in currently undeveloped societies. At the least, Beneficiary Pays provides a natural framework for thinking in such terms.
It is consistent with this claim, of course, that (merely) having an ability to combat harmful climate change (independently of how that ability was acquired) may on its own provide a reason for doing so. I believe that it does. However, if having this ability is the result or legacy of industrialization, one has a stronger reason to exercise that ability; at the very least one has an additional reason.
I am not sure that a compelling case for Beneficiary Pays can be made entirely on its own, that is, without supplementing it with another principle. It may be that some type of ‘hybrid’ theory such as the one defended by Caney (2010) is necessary.
In more recent work, Caney has softened his criticism of ‘Beneficiary Pays,’ and in fact defends a position that is similar in important respects to that view. See Caney (2010).
Caney does not explicitly commit himself to this ‘no comparison possible’ position, but I think it is the most natural way to interpret what he says.
Note that the claim that the son ‘was harmed’ or ‘was wronged’ by his mother is different from the (weaker) claim that the woman ‘did something bad’ or ‘did something wrong’ in trying to conceive a child under such circumstances. The non-identity problem arises only in the first pair of cases, not the second.
Arguably, this is a ‘person-affecting’ judgment. In this connection, it seems relevant that there may be a unique individual (if not a ‘person’) mere moments after the harmful act in question.
Despite my suggestion that the child is harmed by his mother in this case, I think it is clearer (and much more significant, morally) that his mother has done something horrendously wrong.
The qualification ‘typically’ is needed to deal with exceptional cases. Some materially advantaged persons live in non-industrialized societies and some materially disadvantaged persons live in industrialize societies. I take up the issue of exceptions in the following section.
Kavka (1982). In using the phrase ‘effectively a necessary condition,’ I mean nothing more than the ‘precariousness of origin’ thesis. In particular, I do not claim that industrialization is a necessary condition of one’s existence in any more robust sense of ‘necessary’.
There are other worlds, of course, in which I benefit much less than in the actual world.
One other radically different possible world deserves special mention. As far as I can tell, it resists the type of intra-generational solution I have offered here. Consider a world in which the material benefits of industrialization were distributed equally across the current population of human individuals. In that case there would be no differences in living standards amongst persons currently living in different societies, and thus it would not be possible to explicate the benefit claim intra-generationally, in terms of how a person would be, had he been adopted out at birth to a different society. Rather, it would only be possible to understand the relevant benefit inter-generationally (intuitively, in terms of how much better off the average person is today than the average person was in pre-industrial times). Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for bringing this case to my attention.
Here we have the other interpretation of the non-identity problem, mentioned in note 2.
Roberts goes on to defend the view, roughly, that an agent harms a future person P if and only if there is some alternative action practically available to her that would yield greater ex ante odds of bringing P into existence, with a better life than P would have with the original action.
Of course, such judgments can be mistaken: what looked likely (at the time of action) to be beneficial may prove harmful, and vice-versa. However, the fallibility of such judgments does not undermine their usefulness in guiding action or policy.
The point is well illustrated by one of Roberts’ examples (2007: 279). A woman beside you on the subway collapses, clutching at her heart. You have three options: call for a doctor, start performing CPR, or commence an impromptu open-heart procedure with your pocketknife. Your medical knowledge is practically nil. Clearly, the morally right thing to do is to call for a doctor, which is also (minimally) praiseworthy. To pursue one of the other options, particularly the open-heart procedure, is blameworthy. Related, pursuing one of the latter two options will almost certainly harm the woman. However, suppose that you take out your knife and commence the open-heart procedure, and, through sheer dumb luck, you save the woman’s life. On a subjective account of moral rightness, you do something morally wrong, something for which you should be blamed. Given your utter lack of medical knowledge, what you did was beyond reckless; it was idiotic. Nevertheless, it would be perverse to say that you harmed the woman by acting as you did. After all, you saved her life. What the example brings out, I think, is how retrospective judgments of harm (or benefit) are partly objective; and how this distinguishes them –at least for those who favour a subjective account of moral rightness–from judgments about what one should do and whether one is to be praised or blamed.
If so, such judgments would seem to reflect what Nagel calls ‘constitutive’ luck, though he doesn’t discuss any cases of this sort. See Nagel 1999, ‘Moral Luck’.
Clearly in some cases they are not, e.g.,‘he benefited from winning the lottery’ or ‘her family was harmed by the earthquake.’
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Acknowledgments
For comments and criticisms on earlier versions of this paper I would like to thank Nick Agar, Christian Barry, Garrett Cullity, David Eng, William Grey, Ewan Kingston, and Dan Weijers. I am especially grateful to Simon Keller, David Wasserman, and an anonymous reviewer for this journal.
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Das, R. Has Industrialization Benefited No One? Climate Change and the Non-Identity Problem. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 17, 747–759 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-013-9479-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-013-9479-3