Abstract
Disagreements about morally appropriate mitigation policies arise in part from implicit disagreements about the nature and moral significance of needs. One key question is what, if anything, distinguishes “needs” from “mere wants.” One approach, prominent in economics and implemented in existing integrated assessment models of climate change, rejects a hard distinction between needs and wants. An alternative approach, prominent in the philosophical literature on needs, identifies needs with the requirements for autonomous agency, which is the capacity to set and pursue one’s own goals. A second key question is in what sense, if any, the satisfaction of needs should take precedence over the satisfaction of wants. Those who reject the distinction between wants and needs can say only that some desires should be weighted more heavily than others. Those who endorse the distinction can say that, given certain ethical assumptions, it is wrong to frustrate one person’s needs in order to satisfy others’ mere wants. Thus, rejecting the distinction between wants and needs tends to justify less aggressive mitigation policies, in which satisfying the so-called “wants” of present generations compensates for frustrating the so-called “needs” of future generations. Endorsing the distinction between wants and needs, along with certain ethical assumptions, tends to justify more aggressive mitigation policies. Both positions are intellectually defensible; understanding them helps illuminate disagreements over mitigation policy.
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Notes
1 Those worried about the non-identity problem may prefer this formulation to the one in terms of frustrating specific people’s needs. See (Parfit 1984; Page 1999; Schuppert Submitted for publication in this issue).
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Thanks to several anonymous reviewers and to the participants and organizers of the Multi-disciplinary Workshop on Climate Ethics in Como for helpful feedback.
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This article is part of a special issue on ”Multidisciplinary perspectives on climate ethics” with guest editors Marco Grasso and Ezra M. Markowitz
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Morrow, D.R. Wants and needs in mitigation policy. Climatic Change 130, 335–345 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-014-1132-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-014-1132-1