Objections
We’ve argued above that there’s a strong moral connection between the state and those who will be harmed by climate change. States have a responsibility to take action on climate change because they are high emitting collective agents (they are high emitters in their own right), and not just because they have control over high emitters (other agents, both individual and collective) within their territory.
We’re not taking a stand here on the specific content of the responsibilities this leaves states with, although we think that because states’ emissions make a causal contribution to total global emissions, which in turn harm people all over the world, there’s a good case to be made that serious mitigation action is necessary, whatever else states must do.In making this argument, we disagree with John Broome (2012: ch. 4—6). Broome discusses both duties ofjustice and duties of goodness, and argues that individuals’ duties not to emit— either by eliminating their personal emissions or by offsetting them—are duties ofjustice. But he thinks states’ duties to mitigate emissions are duties of goodness. That is to say, states’ duties to mitigate climate change are one instantiation of their general duties to make the world better. One justification Broome gives for this is based on the “non-identity problem,” namely that the identity of future persons depends on the timing of when they were conceived (for the original discussion of the non-identity problem, see Parfit 1984: ch. 16; see also Broome 2012: 61—2). Individuals’ emissions do not make enough of a difference to affect the identities of future persons, so we must limit our claims about the harm they do to people who are already alive. This is not much, but it is still something, and because they have a general duty to do no harm rather than not much harm, they’ll have a duty ofjustice to eliminate or offset their emissions.
States’ emissions are much more significant, but this means they plausibly do make enough of a difference to affect the identities of future persons. They’ll do harm to current persons in the same way as individuals’ emissions do, but we won’t be able to capture the much greater amount of harm they seem to do to future persons—at least so long as we use a conception of harming as making someone worse off than they otherwise would have been. If this is the conception of harm that informs what counts as an injustice, then we’ll be unable to capture the extent of the harm states’ emissions seem to do in the language of injustice.
For Broome, this is a good reason to instead characterize states’ duties to mitigate emissions largely in terms of goodness. Luckily, this is more plausible for states than it is for individuals: because states have a powerful reach, they can make a difference to GHG emissions in a way that individual citizens cannot. Furthermore, states have a strong mandate to promote the good of their citizens, and a weaker but nonetheless important mandate to promote the good of others outside the state. One way they can do this is by taking action on climate change, which will likely have consequences for their own citizens among many others. States can thus promote the good by taking action on climate change.
We can resolve this disagreement by resolving the non-identity challenge, so that it’s open to us to maintain that states’ emissions do harm at the magnitude that our intuitions tell us that they do. (That is to say, it’s no use establishing that they emit a lot more as agents in their own right than we might have thought, if we’re then forced to discount most of the effects of those emissions because they’re effects on future rather than current persons.) Two solutions are promising here. The first appeals to an impersonal rather than person-affecting account of harm (Hare 2007: 516-19; Hartzell-Nichols 2012: 103-4). States’ GHG emissions harm future persons de dicto, that is, whoever those future persons may turn out to be.
Those people are worse off than other people in their situation could have been. But states’ emissions do not harm future persons de re; that is, they do not harm specific future people, because those people very likely owe their existence to the high emissions actions of the state (see also discussion in Eriksson ms). The reason why Broome holds that states’ emissions don’t harm future persons is because he is only concerned with harm de re. Appealing to doing harm de dicto thus grants that future people can be harmed by states nonetheless.The second appeals to a non-difference-making understanding of harm. Instead of thinking of injustice in terms of actions that make a person worse off than she otherwise would have been, we think of it in terms of actions that are bad for a person. The key insight here is that actions can be bad for a person even when they don’t make her worse off, for example, because they violate her rights, or because they put her below some threshold level of wellbeing, or because they deprive her of certain important resources or capabilities (see, e.g., Rivera-Lopez 2009; Steinbock 2009; Velleman 2008). We might think people have a right to live in a world without severe resource scarcity, or a huge refugee problem, or the threat of statelessness, or compromised health through pollution, for example. The shortcoming of this solution is that it cannot account for emissions as harmful when they are not bad for people in one of these ways, even when they leave people worse off de dicto than they could have been for what look like bad reasons (e.g., the emissions relate to luxury goods that the emitters could easily have foregone).
On both the de dicto (impersonal) understanding of harm, and on a non-difference-making understanding of harm, states’ emissions do harm, and they do it at the magnitude we argued for in section 32.3, rather than only in the restricted form allowed in Broome’s discussion (2012).
32.6