Moral Implications for States

The question we started with was whether there is any collective responsibility for climate change. We’ve focused on the specific collective that is the state, and we’ve answered in the positive.

We think not, for one important reason. The obligations that agents end up with are stronger or weaker, and have different content, depending on the reasons why agents have them. You have a stronger obligation to not do harm than to not allow harm (Foot 1967). Being the beneficiary of an injustice gives you stronger reasons to help its victim than to help other

needy people (Lindauer and Barry 2017: 675). Duties grounded in considerations ofjustice are stronger than duties grounded in considerations of humanity (Lawford-Smith 2012).

If states are only proxies for emitters, then their obligations are comparatively weak. The “Polluter Pays” argument for the distribution of mitigation obligations among historically high- emitting states is a version of the idea that the agent who caused or contributed to an injustice is the ideal agent to repair it. Its success in the case of climate change depends on the targeted agent in fact being the polluter. But on the mere proxy view, the state is not the polluter. In fact, on a view like ours, which excludes citizens from membership in the state and focuses on the government, it would not be appropriate to account for the state’s emissions as the total of all emissions produced within the geographical territory. Accounting for the state’s emissions in that way could generate at best an “Ability to Pay” view, where the state has the greatest ability to mitigate climate change, because it is uniquely positioned to exercise control over those who emit within its territory (on the different distributive principles, see, e.g., Caney 2010; Garcia 2014; Huseby 2015).

But our intuitions from ordinary moral philosophy tell us that obligations that come from an ability to act are substantially weaker than obligations that come from having caused the situation requiring action. The thief is the primary bearer of an obligation to either return the stolen goods or provide compensation to the victim of her theft. Compare this obligation against that of a wealthy bystander who merely happened to see the theft happen. We generally think the bystander has no obligation at all, at least in circumstances where the thief herself can be made to fulfill her obligations. Where she can’t, the bystander will be the last in a long line of candidate obligation-bearers (e.g., if a third person benefited from the theft, the obligation will fall to her first).

To put this in more general terms: the stronger the moral connection between the victims of a harm and a candidate obligation-bearer, the more cost the candidate obligation-bearer is required to take on (the more demanding her obligations, and the less she can appeal to costliness to get herself off the hook) (Collins ms). The moral connection we’re interested in here is having contributed to causing the victims’ situation. High-emitters are large proportional contributors to the harms that are being and will be brought about by climate change. The state—or at least, rich industrialized states like Australia—is a high-emitter.

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