Climate change, fundamental interests, and global justice

Abstract

Political philosophers commonly tackle the issue of climate change by focusing on fundamental interests as a basis for human rights. This approach struggles, however, in cases where one set of fundamental interests requires one course of action, and another set of fundamental interests requires a contradictory course of action. This article advances an alternative response to climate change based on an account of global justice that gives weight to utilitarian, prioritarian, and luck egalitarian considerations. A practical application of this pluralistic account is provided, which shows that it handles trade-offs between individuals’ interests in an appealing way and that it supports an aggressive policy of climate change mitigation. This account provides a more plausible justification for rights against the harms of climate change.

Keywords:

• climate change
• human rights
• luck egalitarianism
• prioritarianism
• Simon Caney
• utilitarianism

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Johannesburg, and Zurich. I am grateful to the audiences on those occasions and also to Paul Baer, Dominic Roser, and Kerri Woods for helpful discussion. Research for this article was supported by the British Academy.

Notes

1. Caney (2008, 2009b, 2010), Shue (2014), Hayward (2005).

2. Related lists are presented in Caney 2009a, p. 167, 2009b, pp. 230–233.

3. James Griffin (2008, p. 66) writes that ‘[t]here is a general requirement on the resolution of conflicts of values: if it is not to be arbitrary, one must know what values are at stake and how to attach weight to them’.

4. This approach is suggested by Caney’s endorsement of the Razian perspective on rights, as Raz explicitly rejects the notion that rights override other considerations; see Raz 1986, p. 187. Furthermore, in a footnote, Caney has himself acknowledged that human rights might sometimes need to be sacrificed for other human rights, though he has never suggested that this applies in the case of rights against climate change-induced harm; see Caney 2010, p. 174, n. 12.

5. As Tim Hayward (2009, p. 277) notes, sustainable development has been interpreted by liberals such that it ‘conveniently implies the possibility of a win-win-win scenario for protecting the environment while at the same time securing economic development and promoting global justice. Yet the truth may be less convenient, given the evident tensions between these objectives in practice’. See also Section 4 below.

6. It might be supposed that Caney would not consider patients to have a fundamental interest in access to expensive treatment, on account of their cost. But he treats the issue of cost only as a factor to consider when asking whether an interest is ‘fundamental enough’ to generate a human right. He does not consider cost to be something that makes an interest non-fundamental, nor indeed would he be warranted to do so given that one’s interest in being healthy is evidently a fundamental interest.

7. Henry Shue (1996) maintains that human rights provide protection against ‘standard threats’ to fundamental interests, meaning those threats which are predictable. The standard threats approach, also endorsed by Charles Beitz (2009, p. 111), may seem a promising way to make human rights simultaneously realizable. But few threats are more predictable than poor health in old age, the primary cause of healthcare expenditure in developed countries.

8. See Parfit 1998. Prioritarianism is often described as encompassing two values: a utilitarian-style aggregative value as well as a value focused specifically on the concerns of the worst off. As my discussion requires that I distinguish these two values, and it is the latter that is the distinctively prioritarian value, I refer to them under the headings of utilitarianism and prioritarianism, respectively. For defense of a prioritarian approach to climate justice, see Meyer and Roser 2006, 2010. For some challenges with using Rawls’ theory (which includes the prioritarian ‘difference principle’) in the context of climate change, see Gardiner 2011.

9. The classic statements are Dworkin (1981), Arneson (1989), and Cohen (1989). Other famous luck egalitarians include Nagel (1991), Roemer (1996), and Temkin (1993). For application to climate justice, see Gosseries 2007.

10. One (but only one) kind of consequence of choice would be environmental consequences, which might be approximated through proxies such as carbon footprints. See Schwenkenbecker (2014).

11. ‘Advantage’ is used as a placeholder for whichever combination of welfare and/or resources and/or capabilities best describes individual advantage for distributive purposes.

12. I applied this view to the different issue of allocating the costs of climate change in Knight (2011). The pluralistic account is very similar to Richard Arneson’s ‘responsibility-catering prioritarianism’; see Arneson (1999, 2000). He does not, however, provide a weighting for the different components as I do below, and in the full statement of my view, I construe the ‘luck egalitarian’ principle differently to how Arneson does; see Knight (2009), ch. 6.

13. For an account of this method, see Knight (forthcoming).

14. Values below 500 indicate that the individual is better off through no choice of their own, while values above 500 indicate that the individual is worse off through no choice of their own.

15. As Page (2008), p. 572 notes, Baer et al. (2007)’s 60/40 split between capacity and responsibility considerations is ‘insufficiently motivated’. Such proposals will always invite further questions – why not 50/50, or 40/60? – that can only be answered with intuition. Indeed, Baer et al. (2008) changes the weighting to 50/50.

16. Mendelsohn et al. (2006), p. 166 say their ‘assumptions are based on the IS92 scenario’, which gives a ‘medium global assumption’ of 11.3 billion people in year 2100 (Alcamo et al. 1995, p. 263). This implies a quartile population of 2.825 billion.

17. This approach has, however, been disputed within climate change economics; see Dasgupta 2007, 2008.

18. Diminishing marginal returns raise their head again here, and a utilitarian could argue that even though there is a net economic gain under climate change, there is a loss of utility. Nevertheless, the contrast with the pluralistic account is clear, for that account’s opposition to climate change is not reliant on diminishing marginal returns.

19. The combination of will theory with compossibility is especially unpromising for such rights given will theory’s commitment that rights-bearers have the ability to choose to claim or waive the performance of duties, which rules out future persons having rights against current persons. See Steiner (1994), pp. 259–261, Page 2006, p. 143.

20. One way in which interests may be less significant, according to the pluralistic account, is by being the interests of those who have made worse choices. This appears to suggest a different problem for attempting to generate human rights using the pluralistic approach, namely that some people may act so irresponsibly that they lose their rights. There are, however, a number of reasons for doubting that this would impede the generation of human rights. First, just as imprisonment is not usually seen as contrary to a human right to freedom, so too protection against climate change might be withdrawn on account of socially harmful behavior without violating a human right against climate change-induced harm. Second, and relatedly, every human would still at least have had a right against climate change-induced harm prior to any socially harmful behavior, and that might be seen as sufficient to establish that the right is a human right. Third, it is only one (luck egalitarian) component of the pluralistic view that might in principle support the denial of rights on account of choices, so the overall view may well resist that denial. Finally, the luck egalitarian component itself is best construed as treating any apparently fully responsible act as only partly responsible on account of general metaphysical doubts, and hence, it is unlikely that rights would be withdrawn on account of choices, although they might be weakened; see Knight (2015).