Week 4 - Responsibility and Climate Change Flashcards
Remedial Responsibility
Means having a duty to respond to an unjust situation
Holism
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
Atomism
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
A hypothesis?
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.
Principles for distributing responsibility
- The ability to pay principle
- The beneficiary pays principle
- The contribution to problem principle
The ability to pay principle (APP)
“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.
The Contribution to Problem Principle (CPP)
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.
The Beneficiary Pays Principle (BPP)
“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
Objections to the APP
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.
Objections to CPP
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.
What are the two functions of each principle?
1) . To identify the duty-bearers
- Who pays
2) . To determine the extent of duties
- How much question
Attack “Who Pays”?
- It is wrong to say that agents have (any) remedial duties.
- Distributing duties to those agents will have undesirable effects.
Attack “how much”?
- Distributing remedial duties in this way will lead to “shortfall”
- Distributing remedial duties this way will be unfairly demanding on some agents
Simon Caney’s (2010) Hybrid Account
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”
Poverty-Sensitive polluter pays principle
Simon Caney
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.
Historically sensitive ability to pay principle
Simon Caney
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)?
Basic idea of Edward Page’s unjust enrichment Beneficiary Pays Principle
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.
The Unjust Enrichment BPP
Edward, Page
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.
