ABSTRACT‘Relational value’ (RV) has intuitive credibility due to the shortcomings of existing axiological categories regarding recognizing the ethical relevance of people’s relations to nature. But RV is justified by arguments and analogies that do not hold up to closer scrutiny, which strengthens the assumption that RV is redundant. While RV may provide reasons for ethically considering some relations, much work remains to show that RV is a concept that does something existing axiological concepts cannot, beyond empirically describing relations people have (...) to environmental areas and places. (shrink)

There is a difference between acting with a probability of making a difference to who is harmed, and worsening someone’s prospect. This difference is relevant to debates about the ethics of offsetting, since it means that showing that emitting-and-offsetting has the first feature is not a way of showing that it has the second feature. In an earlier paper, we illustrate this difference with an example of a lottery in which you shake the bag from which a ball will be (...) drawn to determine the identity of the person who will suffer a harm. Here, we reply to Stefansson and Willners’ criticism of that example, explaining how their reply makes a mistake about the point of the example. (shrink)

EU co-legislators recently approved the EU carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM), which establishes a uniform carbon price on both EU and imported products, in ETS covered sectors. This violates the CBDR-RC principle. Yet, CBAM advocates claim that the resulting unfair mitigation can be offset by scaling up climate finance, to the benefit of poorer countries. I argue that the CBAM’s unfairness is compounded by previous climate injustice, as avoidable emissions by developed countries pushed the climate crisis to the point where (...) fair mitigation is no longer viable. This implies that a disadvantage within the distributive sphere of emissions abatement cannot be counterbalanced by additional advantages within the distributive sphere of climate finance. (shrink)

This paper reevaluates wolf management through a relational ethics lens, highlighting the inadequacy of traditional wild versus domesticated categorizations. Recognizing the complexity of historical and ongoing human-wolf interactions, it proposes a nuanced, context-sensitive approach to ethical responsibilities toward wolves. By introducing an assessment process based on the examination of mutual impacts in human-wolf relations, this study advocates for a more informed and morally conscious management strategy that acknowledges wolves’ complex existence within human-affected landscapes.

In this paper, I defend a position contrary to a popular view of distributive justice. Residents of flood-prone or otherwise hazardous areas, like the Gulf South of the United States, receive substantial amounts of aid, paid through taxes on people living elsewhere in the US, after natural disasters that frequent the region. In popular discourse, some argue that we have reason not to (re)build in high-risk or hazardous areas, like the Gulf South. Instead, these residents, and others in similarly situated (...) regions, should “relocate.” If residents choose to stay, then the government and taxpayers do not owe them financial compensation to rebuild. Against that view, I argue that egalitarians commit to compensating many such people. However, I propose broadening our understanding of ‘compensation’ and going forward, focus on agency-enhancing efforts as compensation instead of solely relying on standard post-disaster financial compensation, as current policies generally do. Later in the paper, I offer a metric and tiered system that proposes alternatives to the standard compensation and claim that agency-enhancing compensation aligns with the egalitarian’s commitment to compensate individuals following a natural disaster. I conclude that a tiered system and a broader compensation approach provides egalitarians with more options than the current standard compensation allows. (shrink)

I contend that to be politically feasible a global climate treaty must satisfy the International Paretian principle (IP). I begin by defending IP as a principle of instrumental rationality that reflects the fact of extremely limited altruism vis-à-vis foreigners. I then address two objections to my thesis. One holds that an IP treaty is either economically infeasible or, contrary to its proponents’ claim, does not require side payments from poor states to rich ones. The other holds poor states will reject (...) any climate treaty that requires such side payments because it ignores or exacerbates their unjust treatment by rich states. (shrink)

Indigenous knowledge and work in social science demonstrates the importance for well-being of people’s relationships with places, but western moral theorists have said little on this topic. This paper argues that there is a neo-Aristotelian virtue associated with forming a relationship with a place or places; that is, human beings can form relationships with places that affect their perceptions, emotions, desires and actions, and such dispositions, when properly developed, increase the chance that people will flourish. As well as discussing the (...) virtue, the paper considers related vices and briefly outlines implications of this virtue for dispossession, pro-environmental action, and education. (shrink)

This work employs Elizabeth Cripps’ collectivist account of responsibility for climate change in order to ground an individual duty to reduce one’s GHG emissions. This is significant not only as a critique of Cripps, but also as an indication that even on some collectivist footings, individuals can be assigned primary duties to reduce their emissions. Following Cripps, this work holds the unstructured group of GHG emitters weakly collectively responsible for climate change harms. However, it argues against Cripps that what follows (...) from this is a corresponding collective duty to act qua group to bring about an end to the harm and a derivative duty for each emitter to promote the required organization of a group capable of this. Instead, this work argues that acts of GHG emission, to the extent that they are avoidable and performed with requisite knowledge, make one into a member of a group that is morally responsible for climate-related harms. Thus, individual emitters who can do otherwise should recognize themselves as members of a group that collectively harms. Subsequently, they should take all possible steps in order to renounce their membership (e.g. by reducing their GHG emissions). (shrink)

There are many excellent edited volumes on animal studies and animal ethics. Melanie Challenger’s Animal Dignity is yet another. Animal Dignity is unique insofar as the primary concern of the text...

This article explores the consequences of falling costs of solar and wind power for the ethics of climate change mitigation. We suggest that price competitiveness of renewables reveals a divergence of interest between fossil fuel consumers and producers: cheap renewables strengthen precautionary arguments for aggressive mitigation for consumers but threaten the economic base of producers. As existing applications of the precautionary principle to climate change do not address this issue, we develop a novel approach based on lexical utilities. Given the (...) premise that climate catastrophe entails economic catastrophe but not vice versa, we argue that both producers and consumers should favor mitigation. (shrink)

This paper illustrates a theoretical gap that arises in the relationship between theorizing global justice and local biodiversity conservation practices: the ‘global duties – local burdens problem’. This problem arises if one’s account of just-burden sharing (who is attributed the responsibility to carry the burdens of biodiversity protection) and the geographic realities (who would be burdened by conservation measures in practice) do not match up. That involves two difficulties: (1) a conceptual problem arising from the incongruity between the currency of (...) justice in the global-abstract and the local-particular; and (2) a moral concern about the cultural costs at stake. (shrink)