Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas by Cass R. Sunstein

Author:Cass R. Sunstein
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

THE WRONGDOER IDENTITY PROBLEM

The current stock of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is a result of the behavior of people from the past. Many of them are now dead. The basic problem for corrective justice is that dead wrongdoers cannot be punished or held responsible for their actions, or forced to compensate those they have harmed. At first glance, holding Americans today responsible for the activities of their ancestors is not fair or reasonable on corrective justice grounds.

The best response to this point is to insist that all or most Americans today benefit from the emissions activities of US citizens from the past, and therefore it would not be wrong to require Americans today to pay for abatement measures. This argument is familiar from debates about slave reparations, where it has been argued that Americans today have benefited from the toil of slaves one hundred fifty years ago. To the extent that members of current generations have gained from past wrongdoing, it may well make sense to ask them to compensate those harmed as a result. On one view, compensation can help to restore the status quo ante—that is, put members of different groups in the positions they would have occupied if the wrongdoing had not occurred.

But this argument runs into serious problems. In the context of climate change, the most obvious difficulty is empirical. How many US citizens benefit from past climate change emissions, and how much do they benefit? Many Americans today are, of course, immigrants or children of immigrants, and therefore are not the descendants of greenhouse-gas-emitting Americans of the past. Nonetheless, such people may benefit from past emissions, because they enjoy the kind of technological advances and material wealth that those emissions made possible. But have they actually benefited, and to what degree? Further, not all Americans inherit their wealth, and even those who do would not necessarily have inherited less if their ancestors’ generations had not engaged in the greenhouse-gas-emitting activities.

Suppose that these obstacles could be overcome and that we could trace, with sufficient accuracy, the extent to which current Americans have benefited from past carbon emissions. As long as the costs are being totted up, the benefits should be as well, and used to offset the requirements of corrective justice. If past generations of Americans have imposed costs on the rest of the world, they have also conferred substantial benefits. American industrial activity has produced products that are (and have long been) consumed in foreign countries, and helped produce technological advances from which citizens in other countries have greatly benefited.

True, many citizens in other nations have not benefited much from those advances, just as many citizens of the United States have benefited little from them. But what would the world, or India, look like if America had engaged in 10 percent of its level of greenhouse gas emissions, or 20 percent, or 40 percent? For purposes of corrective justice, a proper accounting would seem to be necessary, and it ­presents formidable empirical and conceptual problems.

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