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Robust Individual Responsibility for Climate Harms

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Abstract

According to some scholars, while sets of greenhouse gases emissions generate harms deriving from climate change, which can be mitigated through collective actions, individual emissions and mitigation activities seem to be causally insufficient to cause harms. If so, single individuals are neither responsible for climate harms, nor they have mitigation duties. If this view were true, there would be collective responsibility for climate harms without individual responsibility and collective mitigation duties without individual duties: this is puzzling. This paper explores a way to solve this puzzle. First, it will be argued that individual emissions, though not proper and full-fledged causes, causally contribute to raise the probability of climate harms. As a consequence, individuals are in fact responsible for their expected contributions to climate harms – this is contributive responsibility for likely outcomes. Second, it will be argued that people have responsibility also for the possible impacts of their individual emissions on climate harms. People can plausibly be regarded as individually responsible for the possible outcomes of their actions in close possible alternative worlds – this is robust responsibility. Non-causal individual responsibility for climate harms is plausible, and the puzzle may be solved.

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Notes

  1. From now on, I shall refer to the harmful effects of climate change with the words ‘climate harms’.

  2. See also Jamieson 2007, 2010, 2012, 2014: chap. 5; Peeters et al. 2015.

  3. A discussion of the participation and the fairness views is in Nefsky 2015.

  4. On the difficulties of the notion of “shared responsibility” see Zimmerman 1985.

  5. Harms can occur by people failing to prevent them or by enabling or facilitating their occurrence. Here, I shall not consider these distinctions; compare Hayner and Weisbach 2016; Barry and Overland 2012.

  6. Here, when I use the label ‘proper cause’, I mean ‘what seems intuitively a cause’, at least prima facie. On intuitive judgments on causal matters, see Lewis 2004: 76; Paul and Hall 2013: 2–4.

  7. I shall not consider the difference between positive and negative emissions – i.e. between direct emitting and deforestation or other actions decreasing carbon sinks. Importantly, I am referring to emissions as ‘a’ cause of climate harms, not as ‘the’ cause; compare Lewis 1986a: 162. As said in i., background conditions are of substantial importance in the causation of climate harms; their importance accounts for the usage of ‘very likely’ in the main text. Moreover, I shall assume that causation relates events. This is a controversial issue, though; compare Paul and Hall 2013: chap. 4 and 5. Likewise, I shall consider the causal claims I deal with as particular causal claims, not as causal generalizations; the differences between particular and general causal judgments constitute a controversial issue, too; see Lewis 1986a: 162. To my knowledge, however, nothing in the claims I defend here hinges on these issues.

  8. This picture of climate harms causation is widespread in scholarship; a recent statement is Hartzell-Nichols 2017: chap. 1; see also Jamieson 2014: § 5.5.; 2015: 29–32. On some controversial assumptions in this view see below.

  9. Here, I follow the analysis and labels provided in Vincent 2011; see also Jamieson 2015: 25–9. Responsibility ascriptions are also a matter of agent’s intentions, role duties and legitimate expectations. Here, I shall not fully consider these aspects, even though agents’ intentions will turn out to be relevant for my view below. From now onwards, if not otherwise specified, with ‘responsibility’ I shall refer to ‘liability responsibility’. When I refer to the causal impact of our actions on outcomes, I shall use ‘causal responsibility’. Responsibility, here, is prospective responsibility.

  10. As said in § 1, for some scholars collective responsibility for climate harms yields collective duties to avert them and a specific individual duty, i.e. the duty to promote and support institutions capable of bringing the relevant groups of people to comply with their collective duties. I do not deny that individuals may have this duty. Then, vi. may be rephrased as saying that individuals have no responsibility and duties as individuals, except for their individual duty to promote just institutions. However, my claim is that there is individual responsibility for climate harms, and that this responsibility yields individual duties to directly avert climate harms. I also assume that these duties go beyond the duties to promote and support just institutions. (On this, see § 5 below as well.) Hence, from now on, when I refer to ‘individual responsibility’ or ‘individual duties’, this should be understood as meaning individual responsibility and the duty to avert climate harms, and not simply the duty to support and promote just institutions.

  11. This principle is discussed in Frick 2017.

  12. More on this below.

  13. On causal overdetermination in general, see Bunzl 1979; Lewis 1986a, 2004; Mackie 1974; Paul and Hall 2013: chap. 2; Shaffer 2003.

  14. My reasoning here rests on a counterfactual account of causation; see Collins et al. 2004; Lewis 1973, 1986b, 2004; Kvart 2004; Ramachandran 2004.

  15. See Bernstein 2017: 165.

  16. See Johnson 2003, 277; Sinnott-Armstrong 2005: 301; Sandler 2010: 170–1; for a discussion, see Morgan-Knapp and Goodman 2015. Doubts about this view are in Jamieson 2014: 180, but see Fragnière 2016: 801. As said, the claim that climate change is a threshold phenomenon is not uncontroversial, even though it is widely shared. On one hand, it seems that climate harms can be increased by any additional individual emission. This should be true if it should be possible averting climate harms. Also, this is a consequence of the mereological principle of causation stated in §2 above. If so, climate harms causation is additive, but it is not a threshold phenomenon. On the other hand, it seems that when we move from climate changes to climate harms, causation is non-linear. Certain harms can be boosted by social and environmental conditions, and certain harms follow only when given thresholds of greenhouse gas concentration are reached. If so, climate harm causation might be a threshold phenomenon, even though climate change causation is gradual or merely additive. As most of the authors raising the puzzle share the view that climate harm causation is a threshold phenomenon, I take this view for granted for the sake of argument.

  17. Compare Bernstein 2017: 165.

  18. For a critical analysis of the connection between probability and possibility, which I cannot consider here, see List and Valentini 2016: 1052–1055 and Pettit 2015: 111–115.

  19. I owe this example to an Anonymous Referee.

  20. Here, I am assuming Strawson’s view of moral responsibility; see Strawson 1962.

  21. I owe this example to an Anonymous Referee.

  22. Simon Caney makes a similar remark, when he writes: “if they [the least advantaged] can develop in ways that do not involve high levels of fossil fuel combustion, and can do so without great cost to themselves, then it would be wrong for them to pursue a high emissions policy” (Caney 2010: 220).

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Acknowledgements

A previous version of this paper has been presented at the Ethical Theory and Moral Practice XX Anniversary Conference, held at the University of Pavia in June 2017. I would like to thank the audience, and Michele Bocchiola, Marcello Di Paola, Marcus Düwell, Dale Jamieson, the Editors of the special volume Emanuela Ceva and Lubomira Radoilska, and the anonymous referees of this Journal for their helpful comments.

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    Gianfranco Pellegrino

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Pellegrino, G. Robust Individual Responsibility for Climate Harms. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 21, 811–823 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-018-9915-5

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