Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-ttngx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-22T20:49:45.227Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Demandingness of Individual Climate Duties: A Reply to Fragnière

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2021

Colin Hickey Open the ORCID record for Colin Hickey [Opens in a new window]
Colin Hickey*
Affiliation:
Utrecht University
*
Corresponding author. E-mail: c.j.hickey@uu.nl
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In this article, I respond to Augustin Fragnière's recent attempt to understand the demandingness of individual climate duties by appealing to the difference between “concentrated” harm and “spread” harm and the importance of “moral thresholds”. I suggest his arguments don't succeed in securing the conclusion he is after, even from within his own commitments, which themselves are problematic. As this is primarily a critical project, the upshot of this discussion is that if there is a defensible way to justify the intuition that the duty to reduce emissions can't be overly demanding, it has to be found elsewhere.

Type
Reply
Information
Utilitas , Volume 33 , Issue 3 , September 2021 , pp. 353 - 360
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Broome, John. 2012. Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming World (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company).Google Scholar
Broome, John. 2019. Against Denialism, The Monist, 102: 110–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cullity, Garrett. 2019. Climate Harms, The Monist, 102: 22–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fragnière, Augustin. 2018. How Demanding is Our Climate Duty? An Application of the No-Harm Principle to Individual Emissions, Environmental Values, 27(6): 645–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nolt, John. 2011. How Harmful Are the Average American's Greenhouse Gas Emissions? Ethics, Policy and Environment, 14(1): 3–10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scheffler, Samuel. 1982. The Rejection of Consequentialism (New York, NY: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Singer, Peter. 1972. Famine, Affluence and Morality, Philosophy & Public Affairs, 1(2): 229–43.Google Scholar
Williams, Bernard. 1973. A Critique of Utilitarianism, in Utilitarianism: For and Against, ed. by Smart, J. J. C. and Williams, B. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 75–150.Google Scholar