Philosophy and Climate Change by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192516121
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2021-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

3. Diagnosis

EU, thus, faces a dilemma: either it is stuck with the implausible skeptical verdict that individuals do not have climate-change-related obligations with respect to their lifestyle choices, or it must commit to the implausibly strong verdict that even someone leading a very low-emissions lifestyle cannot permissibly do things like drive or fly on rare occasions, if it is only for pleasure or convenience. What is it about EU that yields this result?

It is, in fact, something very general about the approach—something it has in common with many other views. And this is that it approaches the question of our individual obligations in collective impact cases by trying to identify a consideration that, in effect, makes acting in the relevant ways pro tanto wrong.

By ‘the relevant ways’ I mean the ways that when enough of us so act, serious harm or injustice results; that is, the ways of acting in a collective impact case that generate the inefficacy challenge. Let’s call these the ‘collectively harmful’ ways of acting. By ‘pro tanto wrong’, I mean wrong on any given occasion unless there is a sufficiently weighty competing consideration speaking in favor of so acting on that occasion. Advocates of EU might not be inclined to use the term ‘pro tanto wrong’ in describing their view, but it is a good way of capturing the very general feature of the view that I have in mind. In the case of climate change: EU claims that any ordinary emissions-producing activity has significant expected harm, and it says that therefore any such activity will be wrong, unless there is a sufficiently weighty expected benefit to doing it. This has the effect of saying that an emissions-producing activity is pro tanto wrong.

Many responses to the inefficacy challenge have this same general nature, and as a result they face the exact same problem: if they can get non-skeptical verdicts at all, it is at the cost of having to say, implausibly, that even someone leading a very low-emissions lifestyle cannot occasionally drive a car for the sake of pleasure or convenience, or cannot even take the rare vacation.

Take, for example, responses that appeal to notions of complicity or participation. Such views approach collective impact cases by saying that even if it makes no difference for the worse, your act can be wrong because it amounts to participation in a system, or way of life, or set of acts—the details vary—that causes great harm or injustice. By doing a collectively harmful act (e.g. driving, or boarding a plane), you are taking part in a system that causes these bad consequences. You are thus complicit, even if you do not yourself make a difference.19 Presumably the claim is that complicity, in the relevant sense, is pro tanto wrong, rather than always all-things-considered wrong. Otherwise, these views wouldn’t be able to say that it is permissible to drive someone to the hospital to save them from a life-threatening emergency. So, these views have that same general nature that I

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