Abstract
Large-scale problems like the population crisis can leave each of us, as an individual, feeling causally impotent in our ability to make a difference. While it is technically true that I can make the population crisis better or worse—that is, most of us can choose either to make more people or not—in the context of a population of more than seven billion, the number of people any one of us can create appears not to matter. Consider resource shortages: it seems absurd to think that my adding one child, or two, or even seven, will make any real difference. But if my having a child doesn’t change whether or not there are enough resources, and no individual will perceive the difference, then it would appear that my action doesn’t actually harm anyone. The existence of another person in the world is a difference that doesn’t make a moral difference. In the present chapter, I will argue that this objection from ‘causal impotence’ may seem compelling, but that it depends on a contentious principle concerning what considerations can make an action morally wrong. I close by suggesting that this principle, which I call ‘Significant Difference’, is not as plausible as it first appears, and so we should expand our search for governing moral principles.
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Notes
- 1.
It is important to note that both scientists and governments regularly use two different measurements to represent climate-affecting GHG: carbon dioxide, and carbon. This can lead to confusion, as carbon dioxide is obviously heavier than carbon. As a result, one might find herself in the situation that I find myself here, having cited in the previous chapter a global, annual emission of 9.6 billion tons of carbon, and then citing here a global, annual emission of more than 30 billion tons of CO2. There is no inconsistency here, as CO2 is approximately 3.67 times heavier than carbon, and so the math works out. However, it is inconvenient (and potentially confusing) that the relevant studies in the previous chapter employ carbon measurements whereas the studies cited here employ CO2 measurements, and so the reader must be alert to the measurement units.
- 2.
Even given the disambiguation that I attempt here, one might resist this conclusion. One might, that is, argue that the act of procreating does approach making a significant difference, and that is because we should think not only about the scale of the problem (that it takes a population of 7.3 billion emitters to cause the harms of climate change), but also the scale of the harms (millions—perhaps even billions—of people will be harmed by climate change). On this view, we can calculate the ‘statistical harm’ that one does by emitting, and when doing so, we will note that raising one’s lifetime emissions by several times makes a significant difference to this statistical harm.
This sort of argument has been made, for instance, by philosopher John Nolt, who argues that as a result of her lifetime emissions, the average American is responsible for the suffering or death of one to two future people (Nolt, 2011). If one were convinced by this argument, then raising one’s lifetime emissions by, say, six times, would amount to being responsible for the suffering or death of an additional 6–12 people, and surely this would be significant.
However, Holt’s calculations are (as he admits) crude, and there are reasons to be suspect of the entire notion of statistical harm. In addition, as I will note later in Sect. 3.1, it is not only the scale of climate change that makes responsibility for harm difficult to attribute—it is the complexity of the problem. Thus, for the sake of remaining as modest in my conclusions as possible, I will not adopt this framework. Needless to say, if one is tempted by Holt’s reasoning, then the challenge from Significant Difference is met immediately, and there are reasons to think we might have procreative obligations in addition to whatever my arguments establish here.
- 3.
For a small sample of such concerns, consider the following: consequentialism seems unable to account for justice, as acting in paradigmatically unjust ways (such as framing an innocent man, or enslaving a minority population) may turn out to best promote the overall good; some forms of consequentialism also seem to ‘fail to take seriously the separateness of persons’, in that the good for one may be sacrificed for the good of others, as if each individual were only a part of one larger individual (Rawls, 1971); many forms of consequentialism seem overly ‘demanding’, or seem to threaten the integrity of a moral agent (Williams, 1973). There are many others, and of course, consequentialists believe that they have responses to all such worries. But for present purposes, it suffices to note that a principle’s being consequentialist makes it susceptible to several kinds of serious, theoretical concerns.
- 4.
C.f. (Broome, 2012, pp. 50–54). Broome’s particular view is that our duties of justice in the case of climate change require that we not harm any individual, and that any emissions at all constitute harming others (especially the worst off). His view, then, is that duties of justice often co-travel with duties of goodness: we are obligated not to harm particular others, and this has a goodness justification as well as a justice justification. However, Broome motivates the distinction by noting that justice obligations are those that step in to normatively require that we act in certain ways, even when doing so fails to prevent the better outcome, or even when doing so actively brings about the worse outcome. So one can (and I will) abandon Broome’s focus on the duty not to harm, since one of the great insights of the goodness/justice distinction is that obligation can come apart from harms and benefits.
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Rieder, T.N. (2016). What Can I Do? Small Effects and the Collective Action Worry. In: Toward a Small Family Ethic. SpringerBriefs in Public Health(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33871-2_2
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