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ABSTRACT
This article argues that there is a just cause for war to prevent the future hazards of anthropogenic climate change even if, because of what is known as the Non-Identity Problem, that cause is not grounded in the rights of future generations. The evidential demands for justifying preventive military action to forestall climate change have been met, as a majority of climate scientists affirm that climate change is underway and is likely to become seriously hazardous for future generations. The types and scale of prospective harms threatened by climate change are such that, were they to result from an armed attack, there would unequivocally be a just cause for war. Though the author argues that there is a just cause for preventive environmental war, such wars are probably unjustified, all things considered. At present, preventive environmental war would be counterproductive and would harm many non-liable people. Should non-coercive remedies fail, measures short of war, such as “soft war” and jus ad vim tactics, should then be attempted to coerce compliance by environmental wrongdoers. Should these remedies prove ineffective, preventive environmental war may be a necessary evil.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Adam Betz received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2016 and was a post-doctoral fellow at the United States Naval Academy's Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership from 2016-2018. He currently teaches philosophy at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, specializing in applied and professional ethics, normative ethics, environmental ethics, and political philosophy. His other publications have analyzed ethical issues surrounding selective conscientious objection, and the relevance of associative duties in grounding professional role responsibilities. He is currently working on a project which explores the ethics of consumer boycotts as a means of non-lethal coercion.
Notes
* The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States Naval Academy or Bloomsburg University.
1 Preemptive war is commonly distinguished from preventive war in that the former aims to thwart a temporally imminent threat but the latter aims to thwart a non-imminent, perceived future threat. I will follow this more or less standard distinction.
2 For an interesting historical discussion which makes a compelling case that preventive war justifications and strategic thinking was common among U.S. leaders in World War II, the Cold War, and in the face of the North Korean threat during the Clinton Administration, see Trachtenberg (Citation2007).
3 For a recent overview of arguments against the plausibility of preventive war, see Garren (Citation2019) in this issue of the Journal of Military Ethics.
4 There are numerous human activities that contribute substantially to climate change, including the process of rearing meat in factory farms, deforestation, and polluting rivers and oceans. I will mention some of these, but will most frequently mention fossil fuel consumption. We also should not overlook substantial natural contributors to climate change, such as volcanic activity and the natural decay of organic matter. As we will see in section 2.1, however, the accelerated climate change we have observed in the past couple centuries is overwhelmingly likely to be human-caused.
5 Henry Shue claims that “we wrong the people of tomorrow by doggedly persisting in contributing to conditions in which they will be unable to fulfill their basic rights” (Citation2014, 293). Darrell Moellendorf contends that, by persisting in the activities that exacerbate climate change, we violate “the property rights of future persons and [produce] both direct and indirect costs” on them (Citation2014, 111). Simon Caney is perhaps the staunchest advocate of a rights-based account of the threat of future climate change. He claims that continuing to exacerbate climate change threatens future persons’ rights to life, health, and subsistence via increases in extreme weather, draughts, landslides, and diseases (Citation2010a, 135; Citation2010b, 168; Citation2014, 78). The rights that Caney claims will be violated on a large-scale by climate change are precisely the sorts of rights whose protection would ground a just cause for war.
6 Parfit (Citation2017) attempts to solve the Non-Identity Problem by appealing to wide person-affecting principles. On this solution, the wrongness of causing climate change would be explained by the fact that it will lead to an outcome in which the people who will exist will have lives that are of lower quality and length than the lives of different people who could have existed instead. This reason, Parfit thinks, is about as strong as the reason we would have if – supposing there were no non-identity effect – climate change will violate the rights of future individuals. Nolt (Citation2014, 72) briefly suggests a similar response to the Non-Identity Problem. Rights-based replies include Woodward (Citation1986); Hudson (Citation1986); Moellendorf (Citation2014).
7 It is interesting to note that the environmental ethicists mentioned above (in note 6) are aware of the NIP, but persist in grounding our reasons to prevent future climate change in individual rights. Moellendorf (Citation2014, 114–115) attempts to address the challenge directly. He appeals to arguments first made by James Woodward (Citation1986) in response to Parfit, and ultimately concludes that it is wrong to bring people into existence whose rights will not be fulfilled even if, because of the NIP, doing so is not worse for those people. Caney recognizes the force of the NIP, and even invokes it to refute the “polluter pays principle,” a principle which says that people who have benefited from industrialization should pay compensation for past pollution. Using a Parfit-inspired argument, Caney (Citation2010a, 128) points out that “in the same way that using up resources did not harm future people, so industrialization did not make an improvement to the standard of living of currently existing people.” Curiously, Caney does not consider that the NIP potentially undermines his own human rights-based argument, which he develops later in that paper and elsewhere (Citation2010a; Citation2010b; Citation2014, 78). And in a footnote addressing the NIP, Shue (Citation2014, 293) claims that “our current lack of knowledge of particular identities in later centuries has no implications at all for what we ought to do now about future climate change. At most, it has some implications for how we explain our more basic moral judgments.” Individual rights and interests are entrenched in our moral consciousness and, despite the NIP, this is no less true among some prominent environmental ethicists.
8 In his presentation of the consequentialist argument for preventive war, Walzer (Citation2006, 77) offers a similar condition: “that to fight early, before the balance [of power] shifts in any decisive way, greatly reduces the cost of the defense, while waiting doesn’t mean avoiding war … but only fighting on a larger scale and at worse odds.” Walzer presents the consequentialist argument without endorsement. His basic criticisms of it are taken up and fleshed out further in Rodin Citation2007.
9 I have added “coercive means short of war” to McMahan’s third condition.
10 The overview of evidence for global warming in this paragraph draws substantially on (Broome Citation2012, 26–28). Broome’s book provides an excellent and highly accessible overview of the basic science of anthropogenic global warming and resultant climate change. Broome’s own discussion draws directly on the IPCC’s Fourth Climate Report, issued in 2007.
11 The IPCC’s Fourth (2007) and Fifth (2012) Climate Change Reports have reaffirmed the basic findings discussed in this paragraph. For an accessible summary of the science, see the IPCC’s “Summary for Policymakers,” available at http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/.
12 It is important to note that all of these security futurologists are cautious and claim nothing like certainty in their predictions. Rather, they are calling attention to the available evidence and trends, and indicating the likeliest outcomes in light of them.
13 Barring technological interventions, such as large-scale carbon capture and other geo-engineering efforts, the world is on the hook for climate change for at least several more decades.
14 It can even be argued that some of the effects of climate change may be so awful that many future people will have lives worth not living; in these cases some would claim that bringing those people into existence not only does not benefit them, it is a net harm.
15 Arnold and Bustos (Citation2013, 470) recommend 2001 as the date at which “business organizations that are responsible for substantial CO2 emissions have a moral obligation to be engaged in aggressive proactive measures to abate their CO2 emissions.” They regard this is a conservative timeline, as there was arguably decisive scientific evidence of anthropogenic climate change as early as 1988.
16 Some poorer countries, of course, will assume less stringent obligations to abate their emissions. No population must render itself destitute in the process of addressing the climate change threat. And everyone is entitled to the emissions needed to secure their basic rights – everyone is entitled to what Henry Shue (Citation2010) has called “subsistence emissions.”
17 In addition to the moral case for a just cause of preventive environmental war developed here, there may be some international legal grounds as well. Two of the six threats to international security listed by the Secretary-General’s High-level panel in 2004 were “economic and social threats, including poverty, infectious disease, and environmental degradation” as well as “internal conflict, including civil war, genocide, and other large-scale atrocities” (quoted in Crawford Citation2007, 101–102). In light of the arguments and forecasting trends set forth in this article, climate change is a substantial international security threat in all of these ways.
18 See Gleditsch and Nordås Citation2009 and Buhaug Citation2016 for discussions of the current and future links between climate change and armed conflict, arguing that the link is not as direct as it might seem.
19 Thanks to Jeff McMahan for this objection.
20 Michael Gross and David Luban have independently suggested to me that multinational corporations which fail to meet their abatement obligations could also be liable to preventive attack. This is an important extension of the argument, which I lack the space to fully address in this article.
21 Perhaps there is room for optimism in that the mayors of several major U.S. cities have asserted their own ongoing commitment to certain terms of the Paris Accord. Of course, it is outside the authority of mayors in the United States to enter international treaties, so any compliance with the Accord would be informal.
22 Thanks to Henry Shue for pointing this out to me in conversation.
23 That every country must substantially improve its efforts at abating GHG emissions to have standing to coerce others is not to say that any needs to be perfect. Rather, it is to suggest that there is a threshold of emissions cuts that no country has yet met. As an analogy, all nations are to some degree internally unjust. But some regimes are much more abusive of human rights than others, and reasonably just but still imperfect regimes could still have standing to wage a humanitarian intervention.
24 This hypothetical example is adapted from a working draft by McMahan and Robillard.
25 Alternatively, the killing and maiming of certain individuals could be justified by hybrid liability and necessity justifications. Individual X might be liable to only N-degree of harm (where N falls short of death or serious injury). The remaining harm in excess of N that befalls X could be justified by necessity. This liability-necessity hybrid justification is developed in McMahan (Citation2011), Tadros (Citation2011), Frowe (Citation2014).
26 For helpful conversations and comments on earlier versions of this article, I thank Ed Barrett, Thomas Betz, Sam Fleischacker, Michael Gross, Doyle Hodges, Tony Laden, David Lefkowitz, David Luban, Henry Shue, Henrik Syse, and Jane Williams. Additional thanks to Carl Rejalde and the editors at Journal of Military Ethics. Special thanks to Jeff McMahan for providing extensive written comments on multiple drafts and, in particular, for helping to substantially improve my discussion of the Non-Identity Problem. Thanks to Col. Art Athens (Ret) and the USNA Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership. The Center provided a collegial and intellectually stimulating atmosphere in which to research this project, as well as an engaged audience at the 2017 McCain Conference, where I presented these ideas in their early development. Thanks, finally, to the Bloomsburg University Philosophy Department and Bloomsburg's Institute for Culture and Society for providing me the opportunity to present this paper in its later development. The views in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Naval Academy or Bloomsburg University.