Climate Change and Cosmopolitan Obligation

Download or read book Climate Change and Cosmopolitan Obligation written by Kerri Woods and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Climate change presents particular challenges to contemporary theorists of justice. Many accept that present persons have a moral obligation to take action to mitigate the worst predicted effects of climate change. However, justificatory argument defending this obligation in both consequentialist and deontological terms have proved vulnerable to Parfit's well-known non-identity problem and other challenges. This impasse is illustrative of the anachronistic character of currently dominant ethical frameworks. The capacity to influence the fate of future generations and of distant contemporaries on the scale known today is a very recent phenomenon, and was thus not considered in ethical frameworks inherited from earlier moral and political thinkers. In this paper I consider the resources cosmopolitanism offers for thinking about climate change justice. In particular, I argue that while cosmopolitan accounts of human rights and global justice in many ways appear to be least challenged by the capabilities of some to influence the fate of distant others, the intergenerational nature of climate change confounds a cosmopolitan account justice grounded in rights, Kantian constructivism, or consequentialism. Drawing on Robert Goodin's work, I find that the most promising route to a negative account of climate change justice lies in an ethic of responsibility tied to others' vulnerability to our actions. However, a positive account of climate justice is more difficult to establish.