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Climate Change and Moral Excuse: The Difficulty of Assigning Responsibility to Individuals

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Abstract

A prominent argument in the climate ethical literature is that individual polluters are responsible for paying the costs of climate change.1 By contrast, I argue that we have reason to excuse individual agents morally for their contributions to climate change. This paper explores some of the possible constraints agents may face when they try to avoid harming the climate, constraints that might be acceptable reasons for excusing people’s contributions to climate change. Two lines of arguments are discussed. The first concerns the soft internal constraint: that democratic citizens do not experience their individual failures as failures per se. In other words, they do not psychologically ‘feel’ they are doing anything wrong.2 The second argument concerns the soft external constraint: a number of studies have shown that many consumers report that while they are concerned about environmental issues, they struggle to translate their concern into green acts.3 Put differently, while individual citizens may think they are morally obliged to avoid harming the climate, they struggle to fulfill these obligations. I argue that these constraints do not constitute reasons for not blaming individual agents. Instead, individual agents can be morally excused for contributing to climate change because external constraints on agency make climate change a case of imperfect duty, that is, a duty that is hard to fulfill.

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Notes

  1. Jamieson, “When Utilitarians Should Be Virtue Theorists”; Stephen Gardiner, “Is no one responsible for global environmental tragedy? Climate change as a challenge to our ethical concepts,” in Denis G. Arnold (ed.), The Ethics of Global Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014): 38–59.

  2. For recent exemptions, see Elizabeth Cripps, Climate Change and the Moral Agent: Individual Duties in an Interdependent World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Cripps defends “direct” individual duties “when it is impossible or unfeasibly costly to promote collective action” (Cripps, Chapter 6); and Gardiner, “Is no one responsible?,” which discusses whether political institutions may breed “the elimination of responsibility at the individual level,” 55.

  3. See, e.g., Ibo van de Poel et al., “The Problem of Many Hands: Climate Change as an Example,” Science and Engineering Ethics 18 (2012): 49–67 at 55; and [Author].

  4. Fahlquist, “Moral Responsibility for Environmental Problems—Individual or Institutional?”: 115.

  5. van de Poel et al., “The Problem of Many Hands”: 54.

  6. Henry Shue, “Normative and Empirical Evaluation of Global Governance” (Unpublished, 2006): 1-8 at 3.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Gardiner, “Is no one responsible”: 59.

  9. Daniel Gilbert, “If only gay sex caused global warming”, Los Angeles Times, July 2, 2006; discussed and quoted from Gardiner, “Is no one responsible”: 58.

  10. Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu, Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012): 1.

  11. Young et al., “Sustainable Consumption”: 27.

  12. See, e.g. Simon Caney, “Cosmopolitan Justice, Responsibility, and Global Climate Change,” Chapter 7 in Stephen M. Gardiner, et al. (eds.), Climate Ethics: Essential Readings.

  13. This argument depends on the level of knowledge required. To show that the argument fails we need to agree on the requirement of knowledge level and accessibility to knowledge. For present purposes I set this discussion aside.

  14. See Maria Csutora, “One More Awareness Gap? The Behaviour–Impact Gap Problem,” Journal of Consumer Policy 35 (2012): 145–163. For further empirical studies of the attitude-behavior gap, see, e.g., Maria Csutora, “From eco-efficiency to eco-effectiveness? The policy-performance paradox,” Society and Economy 33 (2011): 161–181; Tim Jackson, “Motivating sustainable consumption: A review of evidence on consumer behaviour and behavioural change,” Energy & Environment 15 (2005): 1027–1051; Maurie J. Cohen and Joseph Murphy, Exploring Sustainable Consumption: Environmental policy and the social sciences (Amsterdam: Pergamon, 2001); and Folke Ölander and John Thøgersen, “The A-B-C of Recycling,” European Advances in Consumer Research 7 (2006): 297–302.

  15. Sinnott-Armstrong, “It's Not My Fault,” Chapter 18 in Stephen M. Gardiner et al. (eds.), Climate Ethics: Essential Readings.

  16. van de Poel et al., “The Problem of Many Hands,” 54.

  17. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” (1958), in Four Essays on Liberty: Isaiah Berlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969): 7; and Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974): 160–163.

  18. For a good exploration of this issue, see Henry Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence and U.S. Foreign Policy, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), Chapters 1–2. For recent contributions in regard to global poverty and climate change, see Pablo Gilabert, “The Duty to Eradicate Global Poverty: Positive or Negative?,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 7 (2004): 547–8; Elisabeth Ashford, “The Alleged Dichotomy Between Positive and Negative Rights and Duties,” in Charles R. Beitz and Robert E. Goodin (eds.), Global Basic Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Lichtenberg, “Negative Duties, Positive Duties.

  19. See, e.g., Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A theory of freedom and government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997): 17–18; Thomas Pogge, Politics as Usual: What Lies Behind the Pro-Poor Rhetoric (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010); and Ashford, “The Alleged Dichotomy”, 93: 101).

  20. For further elaboration on negative freedom as non-inference and non-dominance, see Philip Pettit, A Theory of Freedom. From the Psychology to the Politics of Agency (London: Polity Press, 2001): 128–129.

  21. Note that it is possible to argue that individual carbon emissions constitute a harm and thus entail a stringent negative duty. Broome, for example, concludes that rectification of climate change is in principle costless because polluters are paying back for what they undeservedly received. Marc D. Davidson, “Wrongful Harm to Future Generations: The Case of Climate Change,” Environmental Values, 17:4 (2008): 471–488; and Broome, Climate Matters). For present purposes I set this argument aside.

  22. Fahlquist, “Moral Responsibility for Environmental Problems”: 112–123.

  23. Note that Broome argued in Climate Matters that individual carbon emissions constitute a harm and thus entail a stringent negative duty.

  24. Gilabert, “The Duty to Eradicate Global Poverty”: 547–8.

  25. Lichtenberg, “Negative Duties, Positive Duties”: 575.

  26. Ibid., 576.

  27. See Thomas Pogge, “Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty”, Ethics 103 (1992): 48–75; Martha Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism” and “Reply”, in Joshua Cohen (ed.) For Love of Country (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996); Onora O’Neill, Bounds of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

  28. Right-libertarianism espouses the principle that each agent has a right to equal negative liberty and self-ownership where negative liberty and self-ownership are the absence of forcible interference from other agents. See e.g. Jan Narveson, The Libertarian Idea (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988); and Jan Narveson and James P. Sterba, Are Liberty and Equality Compatible? (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Right-libertarianism is to be distinguished from left-libertarianism, which holds that natural resources belong to everyone in some egalitarian manner.

  29. For a similar argument, see Shue, Basic Rights: 164–166. For a recent discussion, see Abigail Gosselin, “Global Poverty and Responsibility: Identifying the duty-bearers of human rights,” Human Rights Review 8:1 (2006): 35–52.

  30. Jonathan Bennett, “Morality and Consequences”, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (delivered at Brasenose College, Oxford University, May 9, 16, and 23, 1980): 52.

  31. Marcus G. Singer, “Negative and Positive Duties”, The Philosophy Quarterly 15: 59 (1965): 97–103 at 103.

  32. Ibid., 99.

  33. Jonathan Bennett, The Act Itself (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995): 42.

  34. The debate on the equivalence thesis refers to the discussions of abortion, euthanasia and global poverty. See e.g. Philippa Foot, “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect,” in Virtues and Vices in Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978): 19–32 (originally appeared in the Oxford Review, no. 5, 1967); Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy & Public Affairs (1972): 229–43; and James Rachels, “Killing and Starving to Death,” Philosophy 54: 208 (1979): 159–171. For a general discussion of this issue, see Shelly Kagan, “Does Consequentialism Demand Too Much? Recent work on the limits of obligation,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 13:3 (1984): 239–254. More recent contributions include Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, “Are Killing and Letting Die Morally Equivalent?,” Danish Yearbook of Philosophy 33 (1998): 7–29.

  35. Rachels, “Killing and Starving”: 162.

  36. Ibid., 163.

  37. Singer, “Famine, Affluence”: 231.

  38. While it is worse to harm people intentionally than to harm them as a by-product of other actions, one may argue that it merely makes the latter type of action less culpable, rather than excusable. For present purposes, I set aside the discussion of the difference between less culpable and excusable.

  39. Note that there is no consensus on the relevance of distinguishing between perfect and imperfect duties. For a good overview of the discussion, see e.g. Te E. Hill, Jr., Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant’s Moral Theory (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1992): Chapter 8; and Robert Johnson, "Kant's Moral Philosophy," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2012/entries/kant-moral/.

  40. For example, Aaron Maltais, "Radically non-ideal climate politics and the obligation to at least vote green," Environmental Values 22:5 (2013): 589–608, argues that people have a first-order obligation to vote for green parties.

  41. Pablo Gilabert and Holly Lawford-Smith, “Political Feasibility: A Conceptual Exploration,” Political Studies 60 (2012): 809–825 at 811.

  42. [Author].

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  1. Department of Planning, Aalborg University Copenhagen, A. C. Meyers Vænge 15, 2450, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Theresa Scavenius

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Correspondence to Theresa Scavenius.

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I am grateful to Simon Caney, Eva Erman, Christian Rostbøll and Fabian Schuppert for their comments on an earlier draft.

1See for example, Dale Jamieson, “When Utilitarians Should Be Virtue Theorists,” Chapter 17 in Stephen M. Gardiner, Simon Caney, Dale Jamieson and Henry Shue (eds.), Climate Ethics: Essential Readings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) and Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming World (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012). For a critical discussion, see Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, “It’s Not My Fault: Global Warming and Individual Moral Obligations,” Chapter 18 in Stephen M. Gardiner, Simon Caney, Dale Jamieson and Henry Shue (eds.), Climate Ethics: Essential Readings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Jessica Nihlén Fahlquist, “Moral Responsibility for Environmental Problems—Individual or Institutional?,” Journal of Agricultural Environmental Ethics 22 (2009), 109–124.

2Judith Lichtenberg, “Negative Duties, Positive Duties, and the ‘New Harms,’” Ethics 120 (2010): 557–578 at 561–562.

3See, e.g., John Thøgersen and Ulf Schrader, “From Knowledge to Action—New Paths Towards Consumption,” Journal of Consumer Policy 35 (2012): 1–5; William Young et al., “Sustainable Consumption: Green Consumer Behaviour when Purchasing Products,” Sustainable Development 18 (2010): 20–31.

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Scavenius, T. Climate Change and Moral Excuse: The Difficulty of Assigning Responsibility to Individuals. J Agric Environ Ethics 31, 1–15 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-018-9705-z

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