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Mark Budolfson, Tristram McPherson, and David Plunkett
Maddalena Ferranna
Kian Mintz-Woo
5. Does Climate Change Policy Depend Importantly on Population Ethics? Deflationary Responses to the Challenges of Population Ethics for Public Policy
Gustaf Arrhenius, Mark Budolfson, and Dean Spears
Chrisoula Andreou 7.
Daniel Greco
SECTION III. CLIMATE CHANGE AND INDIVIDUAL ETHICS
9. Climate Change and Individual Obligations: A Dilemma for the Expected Utility Approach, and the Need for an Imperfect View 201 Julia Nefsky
10. The Puzzle of Inefficacy 222 Tristram McPherson
11. On Individual and Shared Obligations: In Defense of the Activist’s Perspective
Gunnar Björnsson
12. How Much Harm Does Each of Us Do?
John Broome
SECTION IV. CLIMATE CHANGE AND POLITICS
13. How Quickly Should the World Reduce its Greenhouse Gas Emissions? Climate Change and the Structure of Intergenerational Justice 295
Lucas Stanczyk
14. Political Realism, Feasibility Wedges, and Opportunities for Collective Action on Climate Change 323 Mark Budolfson
15. Pareto Improvements and Feasible Climate Solutions 346 Katie Steele
16. Climate Change, Liberalism, and the Public/Private Distinction 370 Dale Jamieson and Marcello Di Paola
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the Climate Futures Initiative, the University Center for Human Values, and the Department of Philosophy at Princeton University for support of this project, including financial support for a conference on these issues at Princeton University in May 2016. Thanks to everyone who participated in that workshop for the helpful feedback and discussion on the papers that were presented. Special thanks to Chuck Beitz, Marc Fleurbaey, Bert Kerstetter, Melissa Lane, Rob Socolow, and Michael Smith. Thanks to Coby Gibson, Max Frye, Daniel Gun Lim, Michael Morck, Joshua Petersen, Ira Richardson, Adrian Russian, Victoria Xiao, and Alice Zhang for their work as research assistants on this project. Thanks to Nithya Kasarla, Daniel Gun Lim, and Evan Woods for their help with the index. And thanks to David Braddon-Mitchell for providing the photo for the cover of this volume.
List of Figures
1.1 Average reported subjective well-being index vs. per capita GDP, multinational sample, 2005–2008
1.2 Average reported subjective well-being index vs. per capita GDP, US sample, 1972–2006
1.3 Average reported subjective well-being index vs. household income, Australia, 2006 25
1.4 Average reported subjective well-being vs. income quintile, Switzerland, 1995 26
3.1 The current value of $1 received in t years depending on the social discount rate
5.1 The Repugnant Conclusion
5.2 The Sadistic Conclusion
5.3 Two population axiologies recommend the same “corner solution” to optimal decarbonization
5.4 Families of social evaluations that cohere with totalist axioms on the bounded set
3.1 Summary of the main properties of the three approaches under analysis
3.2 List of the main studies that try to determine the size of the precautionary effect
List of Contributors
Chrisoula Andreou, Professor of Philosophy, University of Utah.
Gustaf Arrhenius, Director of the Institute for Futures Studies and Professor of Practical Philosophy, Stockholm University.
Gunnar Björnsson, Professor of Practical Philosophy, Stockholm University.
John Broome, Emeritus White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of Oxford, and Honorary Professor, Australian National University.
Mark Budolfson, Assistant Professor in the Center for Population-Level Bioethics, the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health and Justice, and the Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University.
Marcello Di Paola, Research Fellow in Philosophy, University of Palermo, and Lecturer in Environmental Studies, Loyola University Chicago.
Maddalena Ferranna, Research Associate at the T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Global Health and Population Department, Harvard University.
Daniel Greco, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Yale University.
Dale Jamieson, Professor of Environmental Studies and Philosophy, Affiliated Professor of Law, and Director of the Center for Environmental and Animal Protection, New York University.
Tristram McPherson, Professor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University.
Alison McQueen, Associate Professor of Political Science, Stanford University.
Kian Mintz-Woo, Lecturer in Philosophy, University College Cork.
Julia Nefsky, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto.
David Plunkett, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Dartmouth College.
Peter Railton, Gregory S. Kavka Distinguished University Professor, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, and John Stephenson Perrin Professor of Philosophy, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Jeff Sebo, Clinical Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Affiliated Professor of Bioethics, Medical Ethics, and Philosophy, New York University.
Dean Spears, Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Texas at Austin.
Lucas Stanczyk, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University.
Katie Steele, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Australian National University.
Abstracts of Chapters
Section I. Valuing Climate Change Impacts
1 A Convenient Truth? Climate Change and Quality of Life
By Peter Railton
Justice would appear to require that those who are the principal beneficiaries of a history of economic and political behavior that has produced dramatic climate change bear a correspondingly large share of the costs of getting it under control. Yet a widespread material ideology of happiness holds that this would require sacrificing “quality of life” in the most-developed countries—hardly a popular program. However, an empirically-grounded understanding of the nature and function of “subjective well-being”, and of the factors that most influence it, challenges this ideology and suggests that well-being in more-developed as well as less-developed societies could be improved consistently with more sustainable resource utilization. If right, this would refocus debates over climate change from the sacrifice of “quality of life” to the enhancement and more equitable distribution of well-being within a framework of sustainable relations with one another and with the rest of nature.
2 Animals and Climate Change
By Jeff Sebo
This chapter argues that animals matter for climate change and that climate change matters for animals. In particular, animal agriculture will have a significant impact on the climate, and climate change will have a significant impact on wild animals. As a result, we morally ought to resist animal agriculture as part of our mitigation efforts and assist wild animals as part of our adaptation efforts. The chapter also evaluates different strategies for accomplishing these aims, and considers connections with debates about well-being, population ethics and duties to future generations, and the nature and limits of moral and political theory.
3 Discounting under Risk: Utilitarianism vs. Prioritarianism
By Maddalena Ferranna
The debate on the economics of climate change has focused primarily on the choice of the social discount rate, which plays a key role in determining the desirability of climate policies given the long-term impacts of climate damages. Discounted utilitarianism and the Ramsey rule dominate the debate on discounting. The chapter examines the appropriateness of the utilitarian framework for evaluating public policies. More specifically, it focuses on the risky dimension of climate change, and on the failure of utilitarianism in expressing both concerns for the distribution of risks across the population and concerns for the occurrence of catastrophic outcomes. The chapter shows how a shift to the prioritarian paradigm is able to capture those types of concerns, and briefly sketches the main implications for the choice of the social discount rate.
4 A Philosopher’s Guide to Discounting
By Kian Mintz-Woo
This chapter introduces several distinctions relevant to what is called the “discounting problem”, since the issue is how (future) costs and benefits are discounted to make them comparable in present terms. The chapter defends the claim that there are good reasons to adopt Ramsey-style discounting in the context of climate change; the Ramsey Rule is robust, flexible, and well-understood. An important distinction involved in discounting—“descriptivism” and “prescriptivism”—is discussed. It is argued that, even if we adopt prescriptivism, and accept that this means there is a need for moral experts in parameter assignments, there is a significant issue. The type of moral expertise required for the discounting problem will not involve knowledge of moral theory—thus making moral philosophy unhelpful in terms of making particular parameter assignments, despite these being substantive moral judgments.
5
Does Climate Change Policy Depend Importantly on Population Ethics? Deflationary Responses to the Challenges of Population Ethics for Public Policy
By Gustaf Arrhenius, Mark Budolfson, and Dean Spears
Choosing a policy response to climate change seems to demand a population axiology. A formal literature involving impossibility theorems has demonstrated that
all possible approaches to population axiology have one or more seemingly counterintuitive implications. This leads to the worry that because axiological theory is radically unresolved, this theoretical ignorance implies serious practical ig norance about what climate policies to pursue. This chapter offers two deflationary responses to this worry. First, it may be that given the actual facts of climate change, all axiologies agree on a particular policy response. In this case, there would be a clear dominance conclusion, and the puzzles of axiology would be practically irrelevant (albeit still theoretically challenging). Second, despite the impossibility results, the chapter proves the possibility of axiologies that satisfy bounded versions of all of the desiderata from the population axiology literature, which may be all that is needed for policy evaluation.
Section II. Cognition, Emotions, and Climate Change
6 Way to Go, Me
By Chrisoula Andreou
This chapter considers an interesting possibility related to human psychology and explores its relevance with respect to understanding and impacting behavior in the face of climate change understood as a “creeping environmental problem.” The possibility is that one’s best bet in terms of predicting and understanding someone’s take on her individually trivial contributions to positive or negative outcomes is not to look for clues about whether she is individualistic or group-oriented, but instead to figure out whether an individualistic take or a group-oriented take will facilitate her seeing herself as praiseworthy, or at least not blameworthy: insofar as one take is better suited to facilitating self-praise, or avoiding self-blame, with respect to the behavior at hand, it will, other things equal, be adopted. If this is right, it has important implications with respect to attempts at promoting environmentally friendly behavior by activating motivations associated with the prospect of self-praise or self-blame.
7 The Wages of Fear? Toward Fearing Well About Climate Change
By Alison McQueen
What role, if any, should appeals to fear play in climate change communication? Moral and practical worries about fear appeals in the climate change debate have caused some to turn toward hope appeals. This chapter argues that fear can be a rational and motivationally powerful response to climate change. While there are good reasons to worry about the use of fear in politics, climate change fear appeals
can be protected against the standard criticisms of political fear. Hope appeals, by contrast, seem vulnerable to serious motivational drawbacks in the case of climate change. We should not therefore abandon fear appeals in favor of hope appeals. Instead, we should take our bearings from Aristotle in an effort to cultivate fear more responsibly. Aristotle offers an appealing model of “civic fear” that preserves the best aspects of hope, elicits rather than extinguishes our sense of agency, and invites rather than forecloses deliberation.
8 Climate Change and Cultural Cognition
By Daniel Greco
How should we form beliefs concerning global climate change? For most of us, directly evaluating the evidence isn’t feasible; we lack expertise. So, any rational beliefs we form will have to be based in part on deference to those who have it. But in this domain, questions about how to identify experts can be fraught. This chapter discusses a partial answer to the question of how we in fact identify experts: Dan Kahan’s cultural cognition thesis, according to which we treat experts on factual questions of political import only insofar as they share our moral and cultural values. The chapter then poses some normative questions about cultural cognition: is it a species of irrationality that must be overcome if we are to communicate scientific results effectively, or is it instead an inescapable part of rational belief management? Ultimately, it is argued that cultural cognition is substantively unreasonable, though not formally irrational.
Section III. Climate Change and Individual Ethics
9 Climate Change and Individual Obligations: A Dilemma for the Expected Utility Approach, and the Need for an Imperfect View
By Julia Nefsky
This chapter concerns the nature of our obligations as individuals when it comes to our emissions-producing activities and climate change. The first half of the chapter argues that the popular ‘expected utility’ approach to this question faces a problematic dilemma: either it gives skeptical verdicts, saying that there are no such obligations, or it yields implausibly strong verdicts. The second half of the chapter diagnoses the problem. It is argued that the dilemma arises from a very
general feature of the view, and thus is shared by other views as well. The chapter then discusses what an account of our individual obligations needs to look like if it is to avoid the dilemma. Finally, the discussion is extended beyond climate change to other collective impact contexts.
10 The Puzzle of Inefficacy
By Tristram McPherson
We appear to have reasons to act in light of the relationship between our choices and the horrors of factory farming or the escalating bad effects of climate change, even if we are unable to mitigate those bad effects through our individual choices. This idea can seem puzzling in two ways. First, it can seem puzzling how to explain these reasons, given our inefficacy. Second, it can seem that these reasons, even if they existed, would have to be vanishingly weak. This chapter develops a solution to this puzzle that appeals to a novel explanation of why a feature counts as a focal point in the explanation of ethical properties. This solution is applied to show how our relationship to certain social patterns can explain our reasons to respond to facts about factory farming and climate change, mentioned above.
11 On Individual and Shared Obligations: In Defense of the Activist’s Perspective
By Gunnar Björnsson
People who make substantial efforts to help resolve collective practical problems such as that of catastrophic climate change often think that: (1) Together, we can resolve the problem. (2) In virtue of this, we have an obligation to resolve it. (3) In virtue of the importance of the problem and our capacity to resolve it together, we have individual obligations to help resolve it. This “activist perspective” faces philosophical problems: How can the groups that are to solve the problems have obligations given that these groups are not themselves agents? How can members of such groups have obligations to help, given that they have no individual control over whether the problem is resolved? And how can the collective ability to solve a problem be relevant for individual obligations and individual moral deliberation? This chapter develops solutions to each of these problems based on an analysis of individual and shared obligations.
12 How Much Harm Does Each of Us Do?
By John Broome
This chapter attempts to estimate the amount of harm an average American does by her emissions of greenhouse gas, on the basis of recent very detailed statistical analysis being done by a group of economists. It concentrates on the particular harm of shortening people’s lives. The estimate is very tentative, and it varies greatly according to how effectively the world responds to climate change. If the response is very weak, the chapter estimates that an average American’s emissions shorten lives by six or seven years in total. If the response is moderately strong, the figure is about half a year.
Section IV. Climate Change and Politics
13 How Quickly Should the World Reduce its Greenhouse Gas Emissions? Climate Change and the Structure of Intergenerational Justice
By Lucas Stanczyk
Given the accompanying sacrifices, how quickly should the present generation reduce its greenhouse gas emissions? The dominant framework for thinking about this question continues to be normative welfare economics. This chapter explains why the dominant approach should be rejected, and outlines the structure of what the author has come to think is the correct approach. On this approach, requirements of intergenerational justice are understood, not as the means to, but as the most important constraints on maximizing intertemporal welfare. The chapter explains why the main content of these constraints can be given by the theories of social and international justice. Finally, the chapter explains why the non-identity problem does not undermine the recommended way of thinking about intergenerational justice. Even if the business-as-usual baseline in greenhouse gas emissions will never harm any unborn future people, we can still say that humanity is forever subject to a suitably high environmental conservation standard.
14 Political Realism, Feasibility Wedges, and Opportunities for Collective Action on Climate Change
By Mark Budolfson
This chapter raises objections to the argument that a highly unjust response to the problem of climate change is the best that we can currently hope for and is thus
the solution that we should actively promote even from an ethical point of view. Such an argument has been put forward by a wide range of commentators in philosophy, economics, law, and international affairs including John Broome, Cass Sunstein, Eric Posner, and David Weisbach. Among other things, this chapter argues that the way in which this argument fails is both ethically and practically instructive, as its failure reveals how a realist approach to climate policy is consistent with a more equity-focused approach than is commonly appreciated. As a concrete illustration, it is explained how the lessons could be incorporated into a more ethical climate treaty architecture that shares structural features with proposals from William Nordhaus, Joseph Stiglitz, and others.
15 Pareto Improvements and Feasible Climate Solutions
By Katie Steele
Proponents of International Paretianism (IP)—the principle that international agreements should not make any state worse-off and should make some at least better off—argue that it is the only feasible approach to reducing the harms of climate change. They draw on some key assumptions regarding the meaning of ‘feasibility’ and the nature of the Pareto improvements associated with coordinated action on climate change. This chapter challenges these assumptions, in effect weakening the case for IP and allowing for broader thinking about what counts as a ‘feasible’ climate solution.
16 Climate Change, Liberalism, and the Public/Private Distinction
By Dale Jamieson and Marcello Di Paola
Climate change puts pressure on a distinction that is at the heart of liberal theory: that between the public and the private. Many of the GHGs-emitting behaviors that contribute to the disruption of the climate system—such as using computers, taking hot showers, eating this or that, driving cars, investing here or there, and having children—are traditionally regarded as private. Yet today, through climate change, these apparently private behaviors can have very public consequences, however indirect, across spatial, temporal, and genetic boundaries. The chapter introduces the public/private distinction and discusses the various ways in which it has figured in liberal theory. It goes on to show how climate change threatens the viability of the distinction, both by intensifying old tensions and by bringing new pressures to bear. It then considers some options for relieving the pressure, none of which seems particularly promising by liberal lights.
Introduction
Mark Budolfson, Tristram McPherson, and David Plunkett
This volume is guided by two thoughts. First, philosophers have much to contribute to the discussion of climate change. Second, reflection on climate change can contribute to our thinking about a range of general topics that are of independent interest to philosophers. This volume will be of interest both to philosophers working on climate change as well as those working in a range of other fields, ranging from public policy to economics to law to empirical disciplines including psychology, the science of climate adaptation, mitigation, and beyond. Part of what we aim to establish in this volume is that philosophers are in a strong position to collaborate in the kind of interdisciplinary conversations needed to tackle pressing challenges for the world such as climate change.
In this short introduction, we explain the guiding thoughts behind this volume, and provide a broad overview of some of the key themes that connect the chapters here. We also situate the chapters here within the broader interdisciplinary discussion of climate change. (A detailed abstract for each chapter precedes this introduction.)
The first guiding thought behind this volume is that philosophers have much to contribute to the discussion of climate change. This is because philosophers have developed important intellectual tools and ideas that can help everyone think more clearly and carefully about central issues raised by climate change.
For example, consider that the best scientific evidence suggests that climate change will have profound effects on a global scale, and that what we do in the near future can alter those effects for better or worse. In light of this, climate change poses some of the most profound ethical challenges of our time. Regardless of how we respond to climate change, our actions (or lack thereof) will have good effects on some and bad effects on others. To decide how to respond collectively, we need to think about who and what matters, about what sorts of effects on them matter, and about what would be a just or equitable way of arranging those effects. For example, should our aim in responding to climate change be merely to maximize the total economic output of the world, as many influential economic models assume? Or should we also value the health and wellbeing of all humans equally regardless of whether those individual people are rich or poor, and thus regardless of their contributions to global economic output? And what about future
humans, who do not yet exist, and who may or may not exist at all depending on what policies we choose? Does the health and wellbeing of the environment and nonhuman animals matter as well even beyond its value to humans? How should the burdens of adaptation and mitigation be distributed given the nature of the climate change problem and its causes? The first section of essays—Valuing Climate Change Impacts—addresses these questions of value theory about what ultimately makes outcomes better or worse, in connection with responses to climate change and beyond.
At the same time, even supposing we have answered the preceding questions and thus are confident which responses to climate change are better and worse, we must still grapple with further political questions: which of these responses are politically infeasible, and how should feasibility affect which response we decide to aim for with policy and political advocacy? More generally, to what extent are classic goals of political philosophy—such as liberalism, protection of basic rights, justifiability to each person of the structure of society, and so on—helpful in identifying the best way to restructure society in response to climate change? And might the problem of climate change itself provide a challenge to some of these classic goals of political philosophy? The fourth section of essays—Climate Change and Politics—addresses these questions of political philosophy.
Even if we were to settle all of the preceding questions about what we collectively should do about climate change both nationally and internationally, there is a gap between those facts and what conclusions you and I should draw for our own individual behavior. In particular, we need to better understand the connection between the best collective responses to a problem such as climate change, and what actions individual people should take. For example, is climate change essentially a global collective action problem that requires a global carbon pricing response in a way that makes no special action required by individuals, beyond merely supporting and complying with such a collectivelevel scheme? Or instead are individual people required to take costly actions even beyond that, given that climate change is literally killing more and more people all the time as a result of our collective emissions? The third section of essays—Climate Change and Individual Ethics—addresses these questions, and provides a toolbox of important resources for thinking well about these (and other) pressing ethical questions that face us as individuals in contemporary society.
Another set of issues arises from the notorious mismatch between (a) the actual beliefs and motivations of people in the world right now concerning climate change, which are demonstrably inadequate to cope with the challenges we face, and (b) what beliefs and motivations would be needed for us to effectively respond to climate change—and how to get from (a) to (b). The second section of essays—Cognition, Emotions, and Climate Change—demonstrates how philosophers can help us to understand and evaluate the nature of the relevant motives and beliefs, and contribute to the effort to improve the beliefs and motivations of
people in order to create the right conditions for an adequate response to climate change to emerge.
In addition to the issues above that structure this volume, there are many other noteworthy issues that appear throughout the volume. To take one example, philosophers can help illuminate and critically examine the often obscure metaphysical and ethical assumptions about the future that underlie influential contemporary policy discussions about climate change. This is an especially pressing topic because experts often agree that the best response to climate change depends heavily on the correct approach to specific questions about the future, namely intertemporal discounting and population ethics. The chapters in this volume demonstrate how philosophy can help us to make further progress toward shared understanding, and perhaps even narrowing our uncertainty about these issues. In addition, other issues that appear throughout the volume include:
• The ethical and political significance of uncertainty, and risk, and decisiontheoretic principles
• The significance of feasibility considerations and ideal vs. nonideal theory in political philosophy
• The ethical importance (or unimportance) of making a difference in one’s actions as a single individual person
• The epistemology and normative psychology of risk, beliefs, and emotions regarding oneself and others, including updating beliefs in light of the assessment of external experts
The sixteen chapters collected in this volume contribute to these important topics, and give readers important entry points into the burgeoning philosophical literature on themes relevant to climate change. Our goal was to include philosophers working in different subareas of philosophy, ranging from ethics to political philosophy to epistemology to the philosophy of science. We have also sought to include both philosophers who have already made important contributions to philosophical discussion of climate change, as well as those who had not written directly on this topic prior to this volume.
The second thought that animates this volume is that thinking about climate change can be illuminating for a range of topics of abiding interest to philosophers. For example, philosophers aim to understand the nature of political norms, distributive justice, how to respond to uncertainty, our obligations to nonhuman animals, the relationship between collective and individual responsibility, the ethical significance of currently nonexistent future persons, and when the state is justified in using coercion to promote its policies. The threats posed by climate change not only make these issues more pressing; they can also shed new light on them, giving philosophers important reasons to revisit assumptions that have structured much of our thinking about these questions. In addition to the issues
