Week 4 - Responsibility and Climate Change

Question 1

Remedial Responsibility

Answer 1

Means having a duty to respond to an unjust situation

Question 2

Holism

Answer 2

Mitigation, adaption and compensation (reparation) should be regarded as a total package.
Principles for distribution of duties apply to the whole package.
E.g. Caney 2012

Question 3

Atomism

Answer 3

Mitigation, adaptation and rectification are separate issues.
Distribution of duties should differ depending on whether we talk of mitigation adaptation, etc
E.g. Vanderheiden 2008; Jagers and Duus Otterstrom 2008

Question 4

A hypothesis?

Answer 4

Arguments for atomism seems more relevant if we are talking about distributing duties to act.
Arguments for holism are more convincing if we are talking about the distribution of duties to bear the costs.

Question 5

Principles for distributing responsibility

Answer 5

• The ability to pay principle
• The beneficiary pays principle
• The contribution to problem principle

Question 6

The ability to pay principle (APP)

Answer 6

“If you can alleviate suffering/ harm, you should”
Those who are well-off should bear remedial duties
- Threshold or proportion
Duties should be distributed in proportion not relative well-being.

Question 7

The Contribution to Problem Principle (CPP)

Answer 7

Clean up your own mess.
You broke it, you fix it.
Agents who have emitted GHGs should bear remedial duties
Duties should be in proportion to emissions record.

Question 8

The Beneficiary Pays Principle (BPP)

Answer 8

“Unjust enrichment?”
“taking the rough with the smooth”?
- Agents who have benefitted from others’ emitting GHGs bear remedial duties/
Duties are distributed in proportion to benefits received

Question 9

Objections to the APP

Answer 9

1). Irrelevance of causes?
2) Lack of incentives?
As duties are not linked to cause, using the APP will not encourage GHG emissions
3). Perverse incentives?
Potential duty bearers might make themselves poorer to avoid duties.

Question 10

Objections to CPP

Answer 10

1). Excusable ignorance
It is unfair to make agents bear costs of actions when they could not have foreseen the consequences.
2). Non-anthropogenic climate change.
A small proportion of climate impacts might be down to natural variations.
3). Dead Polluters.
Not all agents causally responsible for GHG emissions are still here.
4). Poor Polluters
It is unfair to burden agents with duties if doing so would make them very badly off.

Question 11

What are the two functions of each principle?

Answer 11

1) . To identify the duty-bearers
- Who pays
2) . To determine the extent of duties
- How much question

Question 12

Attack “Who Pays”?

Answer 12

• It is wrong to say that agents have (any) remedial duties.

- Distributing duties to those agents will have undesirable effects.

Question 13

Attack “how much”?

Answer 13

• Distributing remedial duties in this way will lead to “shortfall”
• Distributing remedial duties this way will be unfairly demanding on some agents

Question 14

Simon Caney’s (2010) Hybrid Account

Answer 14

Duties to bear the costs of climate change should be distributed according to:
1). The poverty sensitive polluter pays principle.
2). The Historically-sensitive ability to pay principle.
Note: The poverty- sensitive PPP is lexically prior to the historically-sensitive APP
“… the Remainder should be filled by an ‘Ability to Pay approach”

Question 15

Poverty-Sensitive polluter pays principle

Simon Caney

Answer 15

People’s standard of living should not go below the poverty line. As such, the polluters pays principle is key in making sure that those who are in poverty and need money for their fundamental survival do not have to pay for emission.

Question 16

Historically sensitive ability to pay principle

Simon Caney

Answer 16

Duty- bearers divided into two categories:
-APP base it identifies duty bearers
1). Those whose wealth came about in unjust ways.
2). Those whose wreath did not come about in unjust ways.
and we should apportion greater responsibility to (i) than to (ii). (Lexical ordering implied)?

Question 17

Basic idea of Edward Page’s unjust enrichment Beneficiary Pays Principle

Answer 17

Climate change is a case of unjust enrichment.
- States who gain benefits from carrying out activities which are causing climatic disadvantage to other states, then the former should pay compensation to the latter up until the point of the the benefit that the former had gained.

Question 18

The Unjust Enrichment BPP

Edward, Page

Answer 18

States who have benefitted from GHG emissions should surrender those benefits. Three justifications

1). Beneficiaries are placed in the position of condoning “wrongless harmdoing”

2) . “constrained development”
- the past use of global sink capacity which was beneficial to some means that some countries now face the dilemma of containing their industrial development or inflicting injustices.
3) . Benefits were obtained via accidental but profitable trespass on the Earth’s carbon dioxide sink capacity, which is a global common resource.