In its simplest form, the principle of fairness tells us the following. If a number of people are producing a public good that we benefit from, it is not morally acceptable to free ride on their backs, enjoying the benefits without paying the costs. We owe them our fair share of the costs of the production of that good. The principle of fairness, defended by Rawls in A Theory of Justice and widely discussed subsequently, is sometimes invoked in various areas (...) of applied ethics, such as environmental ethics, social ethics, etc.As it stands, the principle of fairness offers an account of a particular type of moral obligation that obtains if certain conditions are satisfied. For example, the good produced must be a particular type of good, the scheme in which it is produced must itself be fair, and so on. This account inspired a wave of discussions, which set the tone for the debate on the principle of fairness, about two decades ago. (shrink)

Until recently, climate scientists were unable to link the occurrence of extreme weather events to anthropogenic climate change. In recent years, however, climate science has made considerable advancements, making it possible to assess the influence of anthropogenic climate change on single weather events. Using a new technique called ‘probabilistic event attribution’, scientists are able to assess whether anthropogenic climate change has changed the likelihood of the occurrence of a recorded extreme weather event. These advancements raise the expectation that this branch (...) of climate science can contribute to climate adaptation efforts. This paper examines the normative underpinnings of these policy discussions. To date, the debates revolve around whether the findings of attribution science can be used to establish moral liability for harms resulting from climate change. On close analysis, this normative framework has serious shortcomings. The paper rejects the moral liability framework and suggests, through a review of the international climate negotiations under the UNFCCC, that the science of event attribution can inform adaptation policy within a risk-pooling and climate risk insurance framework. The proposed framework is defended both on normative grounds and on the basis of its potential application within the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage under the Cancun Adaptation Framework. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the moral concept of harm in the context of the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage. This paper delineates between two concepts of wrongful harm: interactional versus architectural. It then examines these options with an eye toward developing a satisfactory normative approach for policy. While the interactional view of wrongful harm supports powerful arguments about moral responsibility, it has some clear limitations. This paper makes a case for the architectural view by underlining that it (...) is not only compatible with the features of the Paris Agreement but also supports a distinctive conception of justice. (shrink)

From around the world, cities and regions, civil society networks and businesses, nongovernmental organizations and institutions for research and learning, and many others, are taking action on climate change. The role of these nonstate and substate actors is increasingly being recognized in the new facilitative climate regime. Political theory to date has been surprisingly silent about the scale and prospects of these actions for low-carbon, climate-resilient, and sustainable transformations. Idil Boran argues provocatively for the need for a widened scope of (...) vision, one that has a broader public life of climate action at its centre. While acknowledging the role of the state and the multilateral process, Boran maintains that social transformation is as deeply and more continuously influenced by the engagement of a wide range of actors below and above the state, whose actions are often locally anchored and inescapably interwoven across borders. Bringing concepts of the public sphere from political theory into contact with leading scholarship on transnational climate governance, Political Theory and Global Climate Action launches an exploration sensitive to changing patterns of practice, focused on diversity of actors, driven to explore historically contingent conditions of possibility, and responsive to questions of equity and justice in the context of transformations. The result is a repositioning of political thought on climate change, engaging political philosophers, scholars of politics and governance, and drivers of climate action worldwide at nonstate and substate levels interested in the social and political meaning of their engagement. (shrink)

Since 2011, the focus of international negotiations under the UNFCCC has been on producing a new climate agreement to be adopted in 2015. This phase of negotiations is known as the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action. The goal has been to update the global effort on climate for long-term cooperation. In this period, various changes have been contemplated on the design of the architecture of the global climate effort. Whereas previously, the negotiation process consisted of setting mandated targets exclusively for (...) developed countries, the current setting requests of each country to pledge its contribution to the climate effort in the form of Intended Nationally Determined Contributions. The shift away from establishing negotiated targets for rich countries alone towards a universal system of participation through intended contributions raised persistent questions on how exactly the new agreement can ensure equitable terms. How to conceptualize equity within the 2015 climate agreement, and beyond, is the focus of this paper. The paper advances a framework on equity, which moves away from substantive moral conceptions of burden allocation toward refining principles of public reason specially designed for the negotiation process under the UNFCCC. The paper outlines the framework’s main features and discusses how it can serve a facilitating role for multilateral discussion on equity on a long-term basis capable of adapting to changing circumstances. (shrink)

Originally, the idea of interviewing Iris Marion Young in Barcelona came about after she accepted an invitation to give a public lecture at the Law School of Pompeu Fabra University in May 2002. I had first met Iris back in 1999, at a conference in Bristol, England, and I was impressed deeply by her personality and ideas. We kept in touch since then and exchanged papers and ideas. She was very keen to come to Spain (it seems that her mother (...) had lived some years in Mallorca) and she finally travelled to Barcelona with her husband and daughter in spring 2002. The lecture, which she entitled "Women, War, and Peace," was meant to be the closing session of a course on Gender and the Law, and was also part of a series of seminars annually organized by the legal philosophy department (the Albert Calsamiglia Seminar). Her work was quite well-known among several Catalan philosophers and political scientists and professor Angel Castiñeira-who, at the time, was the director of Idees (Ideas), a Catalan journal published by the Centre d'Estudis de Temes Contemporanis (Center for the Study of Contemporary Issues)-suggested that she could give a second lecture, which they would publish together with an interview I could prepare. She accepted both proposals, and I started to think of a questionnaire for the interview while I was at Queen's University in Canada earlier that year. Idil Boran, a philosopher and good friend who did her doctorate at Queen's, offered to help me with this endeavour, since she also admired Iris as both a scholar and a person. Together we prepared the questions and sent them to her once she was back in Chicago, as there was not time to conduct the interview in person while she was in Barcelona. In fall 2002, she sent some answers to our questions, but the document was unfortunately incomplete. She was busy at the time, so we didn't want to pressure her to finish the interview. Eventually, the editors of Idees decided to publish the manifest about the war in Iraq subscribed by a large number of American Intellectuals together with fragments of Iris's (antiwar) lectures and an article that she wrote together with Daniel Archibugi, "Envisioning a Global Rule of Law." The interview was thus left unpublished. Both Idil and I thought it would be worthwhile to publish it somewhere else, but, for one reason or another, Iris didn't have the time to complete it and we kept postponing the project. At some point, she said that the questions she left unanswered were too complex or challenging to give a short or quick answer, and that she would need to reflect on them to provide detailed responses. Later, we learned she was ill and we didn't feel it was right to insist on those questions being answered. The issue came up again when she accepted to participate as a keynote speaker at the World Congress of Legal Philosophy held in Granada in June 2005. She then said she would come first to Barcelona (where she and Nancy Fraser had been invited to a workshop by the Catalan Women Institute) and suggested we could sit in a cafe and talk about the issues left out in those unanswered questions. Unfortunately, she had to cancel this trip because of her medical treatment, and I did not have the privilege of sharing time with her again. The following series of questions and responses are the product of this rather extended interview process. (shrink)

This dissertation offers a theoretical model to ground language rights, rooted in liberalism and the politics of difference. Many existing arguments for language rights apply what Raz has called an "interest theory of rights" to the issue of language rights, which implies that an interest important enough is grounds to hold others duty-bound. Different claims of interest regarding a particular language, such one's mother tongue, are assessed in light of liberal principles of justice and the politics of difference. A participation-based (...) conception of linguistic justice, which stems from an interest in participating with others in public life in a particular language, is offered. The dissertation also discusses why this approach is preferable to the major contending positions, such as the emerging theory of linguistic human rights, which are unable to respond to some of the most important forms of language conflict, and/or rest on controversial anthropological or metaphysical views. Finally, it discusses how this conception of linguistic rights can provide guidelines for various domestic issues, such as the redrawing of internal boundaries and the distribution of burdens and benefits regarding language in the areas of education, public services and government employment, and democratic processes. (shrink)

In December 2014, 196 Parties convened in Lima for the 20th session of the Conference of the Parties. The meeting in Lima was, in many respects, a turning point in the history of climate n...

ABSTRACTAs the window of opportunity to limit global average warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels is narrowing, the impacts of climate change are already being experienced around the world. No longer of merely theoretical interest, the issue of ‘loss and damage’ has become central to climate politics. Against this backdrop, old concepts of responsibility and wrongful harm are being revisited. Boran proposed moving away from an interactional conception of harm to an architectural one. The former supports the widely shared (...) view that wrongful harm results from actions. The latter turns the spotlight on complexity and social practices. In response to critical appraisals, this short essay revisits key components of an architectural conception of harm. An architectural approach is not an analytic tool to answer the epistemic challenges in singling out those who are causally responsible as a discrete problem. It is an encompassing theoretical framework drawing a picture of a world where vulnerability is inseparably tied to a complex web of social, political, and institutional interrelations. Wrongful harm resulting from climate impacts is inextricable from the constructed environment and everyday practices forming a complex web of social and political interconnections. (shrink)

Some philosophers, such as Kai Nielsen, view Rawls's rejection of metaphysical claims, encapsulated in his method of avoidance, as being compatible with the "anti-philosophical" stance, the view that metaphysical debates are sterile and should be abandoned to be replaced by practically viable forms of thinking. This paper shows that this reading of the method of avoidance is incorrect and argues that the method of avoidance is in fact comparable to Carnap's higher-order standpoint of neutrality with regards to different frameworks. This (...) sheds new light on Rawlsian theory and situates it within the empiricist tradition. (shrink)

In her article,?Beyond the Cultural Argument for Liberal Nationalism?, Margaret Moore provides a critique of this argument, and commends, as an alternative, an identity?based approach to liberal nationalism. Moore draws a distinction between identity and culture, and suggests that liberal nationalism should be founded on the former rather than the latter. This article argues, by contrast, that although identity and culture need to be distinguished, they are not as dissociable as Moore contends. It argues that the distinction between identity and (...) culture is of a kind resembling that between types and tokens? between abstractions and their instances. In so far as culture and language are tangible means by which we express our identity, then identity can be viewed as a type, which cultural components? like language? can instantiate as tokens. A defence of liberal nationalism, even if its starting point is identity, has to incorporate in its main argument an appeal to culture and language to make a case for the right to self?determination of peoples. (shrink)

Le présent article examine une objection contre le conséquentialisme provenant de ce que l’on peut appeler « le problème de prédiction ». Le conséquentialisme nous demande de choisir l’action qui apporte la meilleure conséquence. Or, il n’est pas toujours facile, ou même possible, de prédire le futur et de savoir quelles seront exactement les conséquences de nos actions. Il n’est pas raisonnable d’attendre l’action juste de l’agent moral si le critère de justice requiert de celui-ci une prédiction qu’il n’est pas (...) en position de faire avec précision. Cette objection est relativement moins souvent discutée. Elle présente tout de même un défi important au conséquentialisme car ce qui est suggéré c’est que le conséquentialisme nierait le principe du « devoir faire implique pouvoir faire ». Cet article propose une version du conséquentialisme qui évite ce problème. Ce qui est offert, cependant, n’est pas un argument pour le conséquentialisme, mais plutôt un argument dont le but est de montrer que le conséquentialisme est capable de répondre à ce problème spécifique. (shrink)