Conclusion
We’re endorsing a version of the Polluter Pays Principle that is premised on a more defensible understanding of the state. Instead of considering the state as a proxy for all the agents in its territory, we’ve considered a plausible understanding of the state itself and asked whether on that understanding the state is a collective agent.
We’ve argued that it is. This might have threatened to undermine the responsibility of the state for climate change, given that it no longer includes all emissions activities in the territory, e.g., those of ordinary citizens, smallbusiness, and investor-owned corporations. However, we’ve argued that it doesn’t, because the government itself includes numerous branches, departments, and organizations that are themselves high-emitters, and these emissions accumulate to make rich, industrialized states like Australia culpable emitters. Our argument here should not be taken to imply that none of the other distributive principles create responsibilities for the state. We think it’s probably true that a state like Australia’s climate change obligations are compounded by the fact that it has benefited from its historical emissions, and that in virtue of being rich and industrialized it has an enhanced capacity to take action. We’ve been focused on what we take to be the strongest source of obligations, not what we take to be the only source of obligations. In sum: there is collective responsibility for climate change, and it’s right where we thought it was, but for reasons other than we might have originally believed.Notes
1 This does not exhaust the logical space of options, because there could also be no responsibility, but we’ll dismiss that possibility here. Additionally, some philosophers argue that responsibility can be shared among individual agents (see e.g. Bjornsson 2014; Pinkert 2014; Schwenkenbecher 2013).
Since this responsibility resides at the individual level, though, we take this to be a species of individual, and not collective, responsibility.2 There is thus no collective responsibility befalling, say, the set of affluent consumers in western countries, who together cause high GHG emissions, because this is not the kind of entity that can act (Lawford-Smith 2018).
3 There is a further question about the responsibility of the individual members of a responsible collective.
4 List and Pettit’s terminology differs slightly from ours, in that they call theirs an account of group, rather than collective, agency.
5 Interestingly, the emissions from military activities were exempted from national GHG inventories in international negotiations up until the Paris Agreement in 2015.
6 As defined by Greenhouse Gas Protocol; see their “FAQ”, online at www.ghgprotocol.org/sites/ default/files/ghgp/standards_snpporting/FAQ_0.pdf (accessed: 27 March 2018).
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