Philosophical Foundations of Climate Change Policy
JOSEPH HEATH
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Heath, Joseph, 1967– author.
Title: Philosophical foundations of climate change policy / Joseph Heath. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020055999 (print) | LCCN 2020056000 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197567982 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197568002 (epub) | ISBN 9780197568019 | ISBN 9780197567999
Subjects: LCSH: Climatic changes—Government policy. | Climatic changes—Philosophy.
Classification: LCC QC903.H427 2021 (print) | LCC QC903 (ebook) | DDC 363.738/74561—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020055999
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056000
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197567982.001.0001
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Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
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Preface
This work was originally brought together as a series of lectures, presented in May 2018 at the Department of Philosophy at Bayreuth University. I would like to extend a special thanks to Julian Fink and his colleagues at Bayreuth, both for the warm reception and intellectually stimulating environment, and also for providing me the impetus to assemble my various thoughts on this question into something more closely resembling a coherent position.
People who have helped me in various ways with the development of this work include Idil Boran, Virginie Maris, Marc Davidson, Chad Horne, James Brandt, Hamish Russell, Rachel Bryant, Katherine Browne, Bruce Chapman, Julian Fink, Axel Gosseries, Xavier Landes, Lukas Meyer, Dan Moller, Nils Holtung, Stephen Gardiner, Kian Mintz-Woo, Lukas Tank, and Arthur Ripstein. Some of our exchanges were adversarial, and so the people listed should not be held responsible for the contents of this work, or for the failure to discourage me from making certain claims. Naturally I owe a special debt to those who read the entire manuscript or provided research assistance. Special thanks to Jovy Chan for completing the index.
Portions of this work have been presented at Queen’s University, Duke University, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Brown University, Université de Montreal, Stockholm School of Economics in Riga, Harvard University, University of Maryland, SUNY Buffalo, and of course Universit ät Bayreuth. Special thanks again to members of the Department of Philosophy at Bayreuth for inviting me to present the 2018 Wittgenstein Lectures, on which this book is based. Thanks as well to the several dozen talented students at Bayreuth, who attended every lecture and spent two hours each afternoon pressing me on the various points made. I would also like to thank students at the University of Toronto, both in philosophy and in public policy, for discussion of these topics over the years. Finally, I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Trudeau Foundation, as well as the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto for financial support, which has funded both research for the book and release time for its preparation.
This book includes modified presentation of material that has appeared previously in the following publications: “The Structure of Intergenerational Cooperation,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 41:1 (2013): 31–66; “Climate Ethics: Defending a Positive Social Time Preference,” Journal of Moral Philosophy, 14:4 (2016): 436–462; and my book The Machinery of Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
Introduction
I would like to begin with both an apology and an explanation for the title of this book: Philosophical Foundations of Climate Change Policy. This is something of a mouthful and, at the same time, not particularly inspiring. I have chosen it, however, because of my desire to communicate clearly both the nature and the scope of the work. This is not a book about climate change per se, but rather about how governments should respond to climate change. It is, in other words, concerned with climate change policy. The argument, however, is somewhat backward compared to many other contributions made by philosophers in this field. Rather than starting with a philosophical view and then working out its implications for climate change policy, I start rather with climate change policy—or more specifically, with the range of policy options that can seriously be contemplated under anything like our current circumstances—and I work back from this to a discussion of the philosophical view that one should hold.1 This is based on my conviction that a plausible normative-philosophical theory (such as a “theory of justice”) should have the capacity to generate policy recommendations within the space of feasible alternatives and, thus, should be able to help policymakers both to select the right response and to defend it with serious arguments.
By “feasible” here, I am not talking about political feasibility.2 I am merely talking about feasibility under the ordinary constraints that force us humans to organize our societies with the basic institutional structures that we have. These structures include, most importantly, the organization of production and distribution through a market economy, state intervention to correct a variety of market failures, as well to achieve a less-than-perfect measure of redistribution, and, finally, the absence of any supranational authority with independent coercive power (i.e. world government).3 These are features of the world that we live in that may change someday, but that are unlikely to change within the time frame required to address the problem of climate change. They also serve as constraints on the policy space, in the sense that no one with any real political power, and no one who is in a position to advise anyone with real political power, takes seriously proposals that would require
Philosophical Foundations of Climate Change Policy. Joseph Heath, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197567982.003.0001
changing any of these basic structural features of the current world system. (To pick just one example, while abolishing capitalism might help to solve the problem of climate change, it is not on the menu of current policy options.)
Most of the normative views held by philosophers, unfortunately, have practical implications that fall so far outside the space of feasible policy alternatives that they are unable to make any productive contribution to the debate over what should be done about climate change. This has not always been apparent to those who hold these views, and so part of the task of this work will be to show how implausible the policy prescriptions are that flow from many of these popular normative positions. The problem, I should note, is not that these theories are excessively “utopian” or “ideal” (and thus, I am not intending to make a contribution to recent debates over “ideal” and “nonideal” theory).4 To see why this is not the issue, consider utilitarianism, which is extremely idealized, in the sense that it requires that each individual set aside self-interest and act in a way that maximizes total happiness. It therefore demands both complete impartiality and total self-abnegation, something that is deeply in tension with several aspects of human psychology. And yet utilitarianism is also an endlessly productive source of policy-relevant advice. Indeed, it is so good at generating practical recommendations, under any circumstances, that it manages to monopolize the policy debate in many domains. The reason is that, while specifying an ideal that is obviously unobtainable, its fundamental principle also provides a complete ranking of every state of the world that falls short of this ideal. As a result, the theory is able to generate recommendations under any set of constraints.
By contrast, there are many normative theories that, despite being somewhat less idealized in their initial formulation, fail to generate policyrelevant advice, because they have no way of handling imperfect states of affairs, or cannot be applied under constraint. To take a particularly clear example, consider Ronald Dworkin’s conception of equality.5 Dworkin was emphatic that equality was not only the supreme principle of justice, but in fact the only principle of justice that we need. He was an equality monist.6 And yet the specific conception of equality that he endorsed—that of envyfreeness—while allowing him to identify equal allocations of resources, was incapable of ranking imperfectly equal allocations. This is a peculiarity of the envy-freeness standard, that while it can identify equal allocations by the absence of envy, it does not quantify envy, and so is unable to describe any unequal allocation as being more or less equal than some other.7 As a result, this
conception cannot help us with any real-world problems, because as soon as there is some inequality, it offers nothing more than a global condemnation of all such states of affairs. Unlike utilitarianism, which generates a ranking of every possible state, Dworkin’s egalitarianism has only two statuses: perfect and imperfect.8 It therefore has, quite literally, nothing to say about the relative merits of different imperfect states of affairs.
Few philosophical views are as self-evidently limited. In most cases the problem is that they are formulated in abstraction, and so when applied to real-world problems generate recommendations that are too extreme to be translatable into policy. For example, John Rawls’s well-known difference principle recommends assigning lexical priority to the interests of the worst-off representative individual.9 This means that one is obliged to ignore completely the effects that a policy would have on everyone else in society, until such time as one has maximized the benefit to the worst-off. Then, and only then, can one look to see what the effects are on the second worst-off person, and so on. This procedure is obviously one that can be applied in many different imperfect circumstances, but if one were to work through its implications for any practical question, like the design of a tax code, the recommendations that it generates would be so extreme that they could hardly be taken seriously. Given that we live in an electoral democracy, for instance, it is difficult to know how anyone could go about implementing a principle of justice that recommends ignoring the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population. And yet the most prominent critique of Rawls’s principle, in the philosophical literature, has been that it is too lax, or that he makes improper concessions to self-interest, because of his willingness to concede that too much redistribution of the social product might undermine the incentives that individuals have to create that product.10
In this intellectual environment, contact with the realm of public policy can have the salutary effect of bringing philosophical speculation back down to earth. Bridging the two domains, however, presents certain challenges. The philosopher Jonathan Wolff is one of the few to have addressed this topic explicitly. His book Ethics and Public Policy arose from his experience being asked to serve as an “ethics” adviser on a number of government committees in the UK.11 On his first assignment, dealing with questions of animal welfare, he was asked to provide a summary of the “state of knowledge” within his discipline. He found himself feeling uncomfortable reporting on the views being debated. “On the whole, philosophers seemed to defend views that were so far from current practice as to seem, to the non-philosopher,
quite outrageous. The idea that society could adopt any of the views put forward seemed almost laughable. To put it mildly, from the point of view of public policy the views were unreasonable and unacceptable.”12
One can see a similar problem quite clearly in the case of climate change, where the philosophical discussion has been occurring in a discursive space that is almost completely separate from the policy debate. Practical-minded philosophers have noticed this and been troubled by the disconnect. The way that they express their concern, however, has usually been by complaining that the policy debate is dominated by economists. This is often accompanied by the suggestion that economists have been using some sort of dirty trick to acquire this influence. The most commonly voiced suspicion is that economists have been misrepresenting themselves as purveyors of purely scientific or technical advice, and therefore as neutral experts.13 Thus the central strategy, among philosophers, by which to elbow aside economists and establish their own place at the table, has been to insist that climate change is a moral problem, and that, as such, it cannot be addressed without consulting the special expertise of “climate ethicists.”14
If one examines the policy literature, however, one can see the problem with this suggestion. First and foremost, it has always been fairly clear to everyone involved that the problem of anthropogenic climate change has an important moral dimension. One struggles to find an economist of any importance who has ever denied this. Economists simply use a normative vocabulary that is different from the one favored by philosophers and environmental ethicists. The real difference, and the reason that economists have achieved such influence over policymakers, is that they always have something useful to say about the relative merits of the policy options that are actually on the table. Philosophers, by contrast, have a habit of rejecting all the options, then criticizing the construction of the table. There is something to be said, intellectually, for having people around who adopt such radical stances, questioning the paradigm, problematizing the taken-for-granted, waking people from their dogmatic slumbers, and so on. But it is a bit rich for those who adopt these gratifying stances to complain about having insufficient influence over policy, when the theories they are advancing would require a complete structural transformation of society, and possibly human nature as well, in order to be implemented.
The problem of inapplicability is, unfortunately, more pronounced for deontological moral theories than it is for consequentialist ones. Again, because consequentialism is all about producing good outcomes, it lends itself
quite naturally to a ranking of outcomes even under adverse conditions. This is obvious in the case of utilitarianism, but it is true of pretty much any consequentialist theory that treats all outcomes as morally commensurable. Furthermore, there is not that much difference between moral consequentialism and the normative vocabulary employed by economists. As a result, philosophers who embrace some form of consequentialism as a comprehensive moral theory—John Broome is the most prominent example—have had little trouble engaging with the nuts and bolts of the policy debates over climate change.15 Consequentialism, however, is a minority view among philosophers. Especially in political philosophy, neo-Kantian views of one sort or another, largely inspired by the work of John Rawls, are far more widely held.
Kant, of course, was somewhat exceptional in his willingness to act on principle, without regard for the consequences. Modern deontologists inevitably have more moderate views—e.g. they are, for the most part, willing to lie if doing so could prevent a murder. Nevertheless, there is still a strong tendency to want to rule things out “categorically,” which can interfere with a judicious weighing of the anticipated consequences. This becomes a challenge when it comes to thinking about climate change policy, which is all about making trade-offs, in some cases very difficult ones. Consider T. M. Scanlon’s contractualism, which is widely regarded by philosophers as a credible alternative to utilitarianism. Scanlon considers it an attractive feature of his view that it rejects aggregationism (crudely put, the idea that the needs of the many can outweigh those of the few). While this may have certain advantages in abstraction, or in the stylized examples that philosophers enjoy inventing, it makes the view very difficult to apply in real-world circumstances.
Take, for example, the philosophical puzzle known as “the numbers problem.” John Taurek made the observation, back in 1977, that in a typical “lifeboat” scenario, in which it is possible to save the lives of some, but not all, the best way to decide who lives and who dies will be to hold a lottery, in which each individual is given an equal chance of surviving.16 If, however, one applies this same principle to the situation in which one has a choice between saving one person and saving a group of people, it recommends tossing a coin, in order to decide which to save, since doing so gives each person an equal chance of being saved (i.e. 50 percent). This doesn’t seem quite right—almost everyone is of the view that one should save the larger number in this case.
For the most part, philosophers who were aware of this puzzle considered it little more than a curiosity, until Scanlon announced that he had a solution to it, which involved saving the larger group, but did not require giving greater weight to the fact that they were more numerous.17 Scanlon’s argument, however, proved so unpersuasive that it led to widespread reevaluation of the challenge. What was once regarded as a curiosity came to be seen as a very grave problem. In subsequent years, an extraordinary amount of ingenuity came to be deployed, by philosophers trying to provide an intuitively correct solution to the numbers problem, without just giving in to the idea that the needs of the many, in this case, really do outweigh the needs of the one.18
With all deference to those involved in these debates, I think it is fair to say that the jury is still out on whether this variant of contractualism is able to respond to the challenge.19 Consider then the unenviable circumstance of those who would like to apply a Scanlonian contractualist framework to the problem of climate change.20 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that try to assess potential damages from climate change are sobering documents.21 Scenarios are being considered that, in the long term, involve large-scale collapse of agriculture that could lead to the starvation of millions, sea-level rise that could displace hundreds of millions, loss of as much as half of the earth’s biodiversity, and so on. These are not inevitable consequences, but nevertheless, they are of a moral gravity that necessarily commands our utmost attention and concern. The policies that we adopt now will have extremely serious consequences for our descendants. Given this fact, how can we expect any policymaker to evaluate the options using a normative framework that struggles to explain why it is better to save five people from drowning than it is to save one? The economist’s utilitarianism looks good by comparison—even if it is a devil, at least it is the devil we know.
Of course, if the damages were all on the side of climate change effects, then the rigidity of these deontological views might not be such a problem. What makes the current set of policy questions so difficult is that much of the quality of life that we enjoy—and much of the prospective gains in quality of life that billions of people in poor countries hope someday to enjoy—depends upon processes that emit greenhouse gases (GHGs), first and foremost the consumption of fossil fuel. To pick just one example, the current human population is sustained only because of the extraordinary increase in agricultural productivity enabled by the Haber-Bosch process, which extracts nitrogen directly from the atmosphere, where it can subsequently be used in
the production of synthetic fertilizers. About 40 percent of current food production depends upon this process, which is estimated to consume 2 percent of world energy supply.22 Without it, the amount of agricultural land under cultivation would have to quadruple (increasing the land under cultivation from less than 15 percent of global ice-free landmass to almost 50 percent).23 This would, of course, be ecologically catastrophic, would require massive displacement of human populations, and would also exacerbate climate change. So far however, there is no efficient technological alternative to the use of fossil fuel (primarily natural gas) in the extraction of nitrogen from the atmosphere.24 This is why modern agriculture is sometimes described as a process that transforms fossil fuel into food. Absent technological progress, we are—for essentially Malthusian reasons—locked into producing the emissions currently associated with this process.
A similar story could be told about the production of steel or aluminum, the use of concrete in construction, and the fossil-fuel dependence of aviation or shipping. These are the building blocks of economic development, the success of which impacts the lives of billions of people. Again, to pick just one example, it is estimated that 10 percent of all deaths in India are linked, in one way or another, to poor sanitation.25 Much of this is due to inadequate or nonexistent sewage and toilet facilities—approximately 450 million people in that country still engage in “open defecation,” creating a situation that could plausibly be described as a public health catastrophe. And yet the installation of lavatories and sewage treatment for this many people is an enormous project, completion of which will necessarily involve the use of metal, concrete, and plastics on a massive scale, not to mention the energy used in pumping water. India, however, gets more than half its energy from burning coal—the consumption of which has been increasing at a rate of over 5 percent per year in that country. This is obviously contributing to a different sort of catastrophe. In this context, environmental policy may seem like a matter of deciding which catastrophe is the least bad. Ideally, however, it involves deciding how best to balance the short-term gains that can be achieved through increased energy consumption with the long-terms costs of accelerated climate change. It is not an exaggeration to say that millions of lives depend upon this question being answered correctly.
Many of these dilemmas are a consequence of the speed with which economic development has been occurring around the world. As is often pointed out, more people have been lifted out of poverty, more quickly, in the past 25 years than at any other time in human history. This has made it impossible
to ignore the contribution made by developing countries to the problem of climate change. In these countries, however, the trade-off between carbon abatement and development is obvious. Back in the 20th century, in the runup to the signing of the Kyoto Accord, it was easier to characterize climate change as a consequence of rich countries polluting the atmosphere, to the detriment of poor countries. This in turn made it possible for philosophers and environmentalists to shrug off the costs of carbon abatement, as though combating climate change would only require paring back the “luxury” consumption of affluent Westerners. This stance is no longer credible. Over the decade ending in 2016, European Union countries managed to achieve combined emissions reductions from 5,215 to 4,303 megatons of CO2-equivalent. During that same period, China increased its emissions from 8,353 to 12,750 megatons, which is to say, over the course of a decade China added more emissions than the EU countries—including France, Germany, and the United Kingdom—produce as a whole.26 And yet, because of the enormous benefits that flow from economic development in China, it is impossible to talk about climate change policy without taking seriously the trade-offs involved.
In Canada, where I live and work, various features of the economic and political situation have made it such that the trade-offs involved in climate change policy are also difficult to ignore. It is, in fact, not an accident that my own work has focused so resolutely on the policy dilemmas that are generated by the climate change problem. Canada has proven oil reserves of approximately 167 billion barrels (10 percent of the global total), over 164 billion barrels of which are located in the Alberta tar sands.27 Extraction of this oil is extremely energy-intensive (pressurized steam is used to liquify the bitumen and separate it from the sand), as a result of which carbon emissions in the province of Alberta are at least six times higher than the national average. These emissions are produced almost entirely through the extraction and refinement process; they do not include the oil itself, which is almost all exported. Because of these exports, however, Canada essentially does not have to worry about its balance of trade. Domestically, the industry generates enormous wealth, which has knock-on effects throughout the economy. Trends in economic inequality, for instance, are much less worrisome in Canada than in the United States, in part because the resource economy generates a great deal of well-paid blue-collar work (and has absorbed much of the workforce freed up by the decline in manufacturing). The demand for unskilled labor also facilitates immigrant and refugee integration in myriad
ways. As a result, much of the backlash against “globalism” that has wracked Europe and the United States has passed Canada by.
Thanks to these economic facts, there is a great deal at stake in the policy debates over climate change in Canada. It is a basic principle of politics that the only way to achieve change is through a confluence of ideas and interests. It is not sufficient merely to have the best ideas; there must also be some relatively large constituency that stands to gain from the implementation of those ideas and that can be mobilized politically. Mere ideological commitment is normally insufficient—not only is it motivationally weak, but it typically only mobilizes small numbers of people. This is something that academics find deeply counterintuitive, and often slightly repulsive—the fact that in order to implement their ideas, it is necessary to build alliances with interest groups, often ones who have only an instrumental commitment to those ideas.
In the United States, it is extremely difficult to find any large group that stands to gain from any carbon abatement undertaken in the next few decades. By contrast, it is extremely easy to identify and mobilize people who would lose—ranging from petrochemical companies to SUV drivers. That, combined with governance failure in the US political system, has resulted in the state being almost completely dominated by interests opposed to climate change mitigation. Thus the confluence of ideas and interests that would be necessary to force any significant changes in policy is practically impossible to achieve. One perverse consequence of this state of affairs is that it has freed US academics from any obligation to think in practical terms about the consequences of their ideas. They are so completely cut off from political influence that it quite literally does not matter what they think. As a result, they have very little reason to think carefully about the policy consequences of their views. This can generate a self-reinforcing dynamic, in which the more impractical their ideas become, the less likely anyone is to consult them on matters of policy, which in turn reduces whatever incentive they may have had to moderate their ideas.
Throughout most of Western Europe the opposite state of affairs prevails. Here there are practically no fossil fuel interests. Indeed, European dependence upon Russian natural gas imports is an economic liability, a geopolitical weakness, and a political embarrassment. So for the most part, European states (including the UK) have a great deal to gain and little to lose from decarbonization. But because of this, environmental ideas often encounter little resistance, no matter how extreme. Academics—including philosophers— are often consulted on matters of policy, but there is seldom much challenge
to their views. Thus ideas that are completely impractical on a global scale get a pass domestically because there is no constituency that has a strong interest in challenging them.28 As a result, much of the academic debate is focused on choosing which shade of radical green politics the various participants find most congenial.29
Canada, by contrast, is in the peculiar situation of reproducing domestically many of the same conflicts of interest that exist globally. There are two major poles of political power in the country—the “ethnic block” of francophone voters in Quebec and the “oil patch” interests in Alberta.30 Control of the federal government (and the position of prime minister) passes back and forth between these two regional power centers. Through a coincidence of geography, the province of Quebec derives 96 percent of its electricity from hydroelectric power (with wind power being the second-largest source, providing 2 percent). As a result, people in that province have nothing to lose, and a fair bit to gain, from an aggressive carbon abatement policy. By contrast, an effective climate change mitigation regime would almost completely destroy the economy of Alberta, and significantly depopulate that province.31 (In another unfortunate accident of geography, cattle ranching is the most important agricultural sector in Alberta. Among major agricultural products, beef is by far the worst offender, in terms of emissions intensity.) As a result, the configuration of economic interests within the country creates something of a “knife edge” equilibrium, where things could easily go either way—toward American-style intransigence or toward European-style regulation. Under these circumstances, it is much easier to make the case that ideas matter. Any climate change policy proposed is going to be very controversial and will be aggressively challenged in both public and academic debate. Because of this, it is important that one have solid arguments in defense of one’s positions, and that one be able to ground these through appeal to very broadly shared norms.
This political context also has a tendency to discipline philosophical speculation, in several different ways.32 First, it makes it impossible to ignore the fact that when we debate these questions, people’s livelihoods are at stake. To pick just one example, if the Alberta tar sands operations were to close, literally thousands of people who have worked and saved to buy a home would suddenly find themselves, not only unemployed, but holding property that was very close to worthless. When the plan is to deprive someone of both savings and livelihood, it is important to have good arguments in defense of that position—ideally, arguments that even those most negatively affected
should be able to see the force of. Second, it pushes one to recognize the seriousness of the governance challenge posed by these conflicts. It is one thing to say, “This oil is going to have to stay in the ground”; it is something else entirely to force people to leave it there. Canada’s proven oil reserves are worth almost US$10 trillion at the time of writing, a sum that is about six times the total GDP of the country. There is nothing to be gained by understating the amount of coercion that will be required in order to bar access to such a resource and, thus, the high level of political legitimacy that the imposition of a climate change mitigation policy would require.
Both of these considerations speak in favor of an approach to the problem grounded in a liberal theory of justice. (This is a central feature of the “philosophical foundations” that I will be recommending.) I will discuss this issue in greater detail in Chapter 1; for now I would simply like to observe two points that support this approach. First, because liberal political philosophy has always been preoccupied with the question of when state coercion is justifiable (in a way that, for instance, many traditions of moral philosophy have not), it is an appropriate framework for thinking about climate change policy. Second, and closely connected to the first point, liberal theories of justice have incorporated into their design a desire to formulate arguments that will speak to as broad a constituency as possible. This has traditionally been a response to domestic pluralism, but when one turns to a global problem like climate change, the need for arguments that have the widest possible appeal—and that presuppose the least in terms of shared culture or values— becomes even more pressing.
One of the major attractions of the economist’s traditional utilitarianism is that it aspires to be a liberal theory in this sense. The central weakness, however, is that it is far too willing to sacrifice the interests of some in order to benefit others. Politically, of course, arguments with this structure tend not to be very effective. (Try telling people in Alberta that it is okay to destroy their economy because people in Quebec will benefit!) The question is whether it is reasonable to expect this sort of sacrifice from people. When imposing real hardship on some, is it sufficient justification to point to the gains of others? In other words, is the mere fact that someone else will experience a gain sufficient to justify the imposition of the loss on some person? Many have felt that it is not. Consider what Rawls wrote (in the context of his discussion of the “strains of commitment”). The problem with utilitarianism, he thought, was that it was too ready to sacrifice the “life prospects” of some, as a matter of routine policy:
The sacrifices in question are not those asked in times of social emergency when all or some must pitch in for the common good. The principles of justice apply to the basic structure of the social system and the determination of life prospects. What the principle of utility asks is precisely a sacrifice of these prospects. Even when we are less fortunate, we are to accept the greater advantages of others as a sufficient reason for lower expectations over the whole course of our life. This is surely an extreme demand.33
Rawls’s argument raises a number of very delicate questions about what concessions to self-interest are relevant to the formulation of principles of justice, which I do not intend to address here. Whether the view can ultimately be justified or not, it is clearly a consequence of the utilitarian principle that it licenses these sorts of “extreme demands.” The question is whether, in order to justify a climate change mitigation policy, we are obliged to turn to a normative theory that makes extreme demands of us. For if there were a normative theory that made less extreme demands and yet provided a satisfactory, or at least broadly acceptable, solution to the problem, then there would be a great deal to be said in favor of leading with such a theory (particularly given the difficulty of achieving international agreement). The recourse to full-blooded utilitarianism, of the sort that economists sometimes naively espouse, should be reserved for desperate circumstances; to the extent that we make use of it at all, it should never be the opening move.
Rawls of course aspired to produce a conception of justice that would be less motivationally demanding, based on the idea of a social contract. One of the attractive features of this theory, he felt, was that it would ensure that no one came out a net loser from their interactions with others. Society was to be conceived of as a “cooperative venture for mutual advantage,” which would make “possible a better life for all than any would have if each were to try to live solely by his own efforts.”34 The principles of justice, he argued, were essentially a set of rules for determining an acceptable institutional structure for this system of cooperation.
This conceptual framework seems like a much more attractive one for thinking about climate change policy. After all, climate change is widely regarded as a collective action problem, which implies that the solution to it will involve the creation of a system of cooperation. A normative theory that offers specific guidance on the organization of cooperative schemes would appear to be ideally suited to the challenges of this policy domain. Unfortunately, while Rawls provided a very compelling way of framing the
general question of how a theory of justice should be formulated, the specific theory that he proposed to guide the exercise was not entirely compelling. As a result, more orthodox Rawlsians (as I will attempt to show), who stick close to the letter of Rawlsian doctrine, have not succeeded in making any particularly helpful contributions to the debate over climate change policy.
What I intend to develop and apply in this book are a set of general contractualist ideas, which are of recognizably Rawlsian provenance, but which lie conceptually upstream from the more specific principles of justice that Rawls articulated (such as his “difference principle”). These more general ideas provide a perfectly adequate and compelling basis for thinking about problems such as climate change. Indeed, many of these are already implicit in the way that policy options are being debated in a wide range of domains. In previous work, I have described these ideas as constituting a sort of “minimally controversial contractualism.”35 My central ambition here is to show how this way of thinking can provide appropriate philosophical and normative foundations for our approach to climate change policy.
The basic framework is relatively simple. Human beings live in societies that are governed by a moral code, the details of which have a great deal of cultural specificity, and so vary from time to time and place to place. Whether or not there is a universal morality underlying all of this variation, existing human societies are characterized by what Rawls calls “the fact of pluralism,” in relation to one another, and usually internally as well. People disagree about fundamental moral questions, and there is no recognized procedure for resolving these disputes. And yet despite all of this disagreement, people also find themselves quite frequently in a position where they are able to engage in interactions that would be mutually beneficial, in the sense that each could be made better off from his or her own perspective. Achieving these benefits requires that they cooperate with one another. Yet unfortunately, given the underlying pluralism, the “first order” moral codes will typically underdetermine the choice of cooperative arrangement. Not only are there many different ways to organize a cooperative interaction, but there is potential for conflict over how the benefits and burdens of cooperation should be allocated to those involved. Thus the parties require a set of normative principles to bring about agreement on the specific modalities of cooperation.
It has become conventional, following Rawls, to describe these abstract normative principles as constituting a “theory of justice.” Furthermore, the basic problem—of picking out a cooperative arrangement that will be acceptable to all—can be broken down analytically into two components. On
the one hand, the interaction generates mutual benefit, and the parties have a common interest in ensuring that these benefits are maximized. On the other hand, certain arrangements may be more to the benefit of some parties than others, and so there is a potential conflict of interest over how the benefits and burdens of cooperation should be distributed. The specifically contractualist idea, then, is that the principles that govern choice in these two dimensions should be ones that favor arrangements that no one has any good reason to reject. With respect to the “common interest” dimension, this constraint generates the Pareto-efficiency principle, which states that an outcome is to be preferred if it makes at least one person better off without making anyone worse off. To see how this follows, one need only consider outcomes that violate the Pareto principle. If an outcome is Pareto-inefficient, this means that at least one person could be made better off without making anyone worse off. This gives that person obvious grounds for complaint, whereas if one were to shift to the Pareto-efficient state, this would eliminate the complaint, while not giving anyone else fresh grounds for complaint.
Things are a bit more difficult with respect to the “conflict of interest” dimension, because this aspect of the interaction is win-lose, and so one might be tempted to conclude that the problem is insoluble, because any movement in either direction will necessarily generate a complaint from someone. There is, however, good reason to favor allocations that divide the benefits and burdens equally, which is to say, those that give everyone exactly the same amount. To see this, consider what happens when one deviates from equality. This immediately generates a “place-switching” complaint, where the person who gets less will demand the portion being assigned to the one who gets more. So while the equal allocation is still vulnerable to self-serving objections from those who want arrangements more favorable to their own interests, it nevertheless neutralizes a specific type of complaint. Of course, finding the equal allocation raises a number of difficult technical questions, depending upon how complex the system of cooperation is, and what form the benefits and burdens take. Nevertheless, the idea of finding an allocation that neutralizes the desire to switch places provides powerful orientation to the task.
One need not think that these two principles are so powerful as to compel rational agreement in all cases to see that they will, nevertheless, have a strong tendency to minimize conflict. While they are unlikely to silence all objections, efficiency and equality do eliminate two very obvious sources of complaint. They can also be generalized to produce a ranking of imperfect
states of affairs, using some notion of “intensity” or “seriousness” of complaint. Again, there are technical challenges involved in this, but the task is not insuperable. The overall result is typically a prioritarian theory of justice, which permits deviations from equality in order to achieve gains in welfare, but insists that these gains in welfare must be larger the further removed one is from equality.36 Institutional arrangements that satisfy these constraints are often referred to as “fair.” Thus my central philosophical contention will be that we should be thinking about climate change policy in terms of the fairness of our existing institutional arrangements and the level of emissions that they permit.
It is worth emphasizing that a minimal conception of justice developed along these lines is generally not put forward as a complete theory of morality. People have a variety of “thick” moral commitments, which govern many other areas of life beyond just cooperative interactions. Among philosophers, David Gauthier is almost alone in having suggested that a contractual theory of this sort was the sum total of morality, and even then he qualified this claim in various ways. The standard contractualist view follows David Hume, who drew a distinction between the “natural” and the “artificial” virtues, where the latter were a set of traits specifically cultivated to encourage cooperation in areas where individuals could derive mutual benefit from normatively regulated interaction.37 Under such a framework, there might be certain moral duties that impose basic requirements of respect and charity toward all persons, regardless of circumstance, whereas duties of justice would be more narrow, applying only to the outcome of cooperative interactions, but at the same time imposing much stricter demands.
There are a variety of different ways of drawing a distinction along these lines. Rawls, for instance, distinguished between the “political” conception of justice that should govern the basic institutional structure of society— and is thus focused on assigning the benefits and burdens of cooperation— from the “comprehensive moral views” held by individual citizens. This implies that the “political” obligations we have toward other people—duties that flow from our conception of justice—are not exhaustive, we may have moral obligations as well. Thus neither Rawls nor the minimally controversial contractualist is committed to the view that, outside of cooperative interactions, we are normatively unconstrained in our relations with other people. The duties of justice specified by the contractualist framework are simply the most important of the duties owed to others and, in particular, those whose enforcement is most easily justified.
My objective in this book is to show that minimally controversial contractualism provides all of the normative resources we require for thinking about climate change policy understood as the set of obligations that are to be coercively imposed—even if it does not provide the basis for a complete environmental philosophy. Furthermore, philosophers have tended to put greater emphasis on the equality dimension of the climate change problem while underestimating the importance of the efficiency dimension. I will argue that most of the heavy lifting, in our response to climate change, is done by the efficiency principle. (For those who are familiar with my other work, I should note that this argument is an application of the “market failures” approach.38 The latter is intended as a contribution to business ethics, where the efficiency principle is applied to the question of selfregulation by firms. Part of the attraction of the market failures approach, however, is that it provides a unified account of, not just business ethics, but also markets, firms, corporate law, and regulation. This book is about regulation, not self-regulation, and so it falls outside the purview of business ethics. But those who follow this literature will notice that I am using the same normative framework, this time to call for a regulatory solution to a market failure.)
I began by saying that this is not really a book about climate change, but rather about climate change policy. Even this turns out to be not quite true. It is not really about climate change policy, but rather about the philosophical foundations of climate change policy. More polemically, one might say that it is about the type of philosophical view that one should hold—in particular, the approach that one should adopt toward questions of justice—if one wants to have sensible things to say about climate change policy. An unfriendly way of describing the project would be to say that I am using the climate change issue as a way of scoring points in a philosophical debate that, ultimately, does not have all that much to do with climate change. There is a grain of truth to this, but it is not the entire story.
My basic view, as I have explained, is that the climate change policy debate is currently dominated by economists, because so far they are the only ones with consistently useful advice to offer on the question. I consider this unfortunate in one respect, which is that economists typically subscribe to a type of utilitarianism that I consider deeply mistaken. For the most part, however, this does not make all that much difference, because climate change is a collective action problem, and both utilitarianism and contractualism have very similar things to say about how one should proceed within the space of Pareto
improvements. Thus the fact that most economists subscribe to the wrong normative theory does not lead them too far astray on the policy question. There is, however, one issue on which having the right philosophical theory does matter, and that is the issue of the social discount rate. Traditionally, this has been something of an esoteric issue, but the publication of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change in 2006 put it suddenly at the center of debates over climate change policy.39
When it comes to thinking about our obligations to people who have not yet been born, consequentialist theorists are sorely tempted to “expand the circle” of moral concern to include not just actual people, but “future people” as well. This leads quite directly to a number of very serious conceptual difficulties, which philosophers have spent many years worrying about. In the case of climate change policy, it leads to a rather important conundrum over the appropriate social discount rate. In this case, consequentialism encourages the extremist view that it is impermissible to discount future costs and benefits.40 Absent some manipulation, this generates a discount rate that is implausibly low for policy purposes. And yet since this conclusion seems to be the inescapable verdict of normative theory, many economists have been tempted to abandon the normative perspective entirely and to adopt some positive indicator, such as the prevailing interest rate, as a basis for choosing a discount rate. This leads to a rate that is implausibly high. Thus the choice of discount rate has come to be seen as a serious dilemma.
I am not in a position to resolve this issue, but I would like to suggest a dramatically different normative approach to the problem, one that does not require “expanding the circle.” This is based on the minimally controversial contractualism that I am recommending. In order to get to this debate, however, it is necessary to provide a more general justification for the way that the question is framed. Discounting only arises as an issue when one attempts to calculate the “social cost of carbon,” which is necessary, in turn, to determine the appropriate price for carbon. There is a great deal that one must accept in order to see that carbon pricing is the best approach to resolving the problems posed by anthropogenic climate change. Thus I will begin with the most basic presuppositions that structure the policy debate, in order then to work toward the more specific, and complex, normative issues that arise within that framework. There is a great deal that philosophers can learn from taking the policy debate seriously, by recognizing and coming to respect the intellectual and moral seriousness of its structuring presuppositions. And yet I hope to show that, in the end, there is still something that policy experts can
