Security, Planning and Justice: A Reply to Mintz-Woo

ABSTRACT

In a recent paper (Herington, 2017), I argued that the mere risk of climate-related harm was itself a harm, since it undermined the security of individuals subject to that risk. In his commentary, Mintz-Woo (2019) argues that my account of the value of security is mistaken. On his view, the value of belief-relative security is already well captured by standard theories of wellbeing, and the value of fact-relative security is illusory. In the following, I attempt to respond to his concerns. First, I argue contrary to Mintz-Woo that the literature on the cognitive effect on poverty is relevant to an assessment of the value of belief-relative security. Second, I introduce a distinction between ex ante and ex post perspectives on justice, and show that straightforward prioritarian commitments motivate an ex ante concern for fact-relative security.

KEY WORDS:

• security
• risk
• climate loss
• planning
• prioritarianism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For instance, the prioritarian might assign 20 units of moral value (MV) to 30 units of well-being, but only 30 units of moral value to the 50 units of well-being, and only 35 units of moral value to the 70 units of well-being in Risky.

2. There is some controversy (Voorhoeve & Fleurbaey, 2016) over how to apply prioritarianism to decision-making under uncertainty given more than one individual. One may choose by (i) the expected value of priority-weighted well-being, (ii) the priority-weighted value of expected well-being, or some combination of (i) and (ii). In this simple case, however, all three approaches should converge on the Safe policy.