Environmental degradation, reparations, and the moral significance of history

Journal of Social Philosophy

Volumn 37, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 464-482

  Caney, Simon ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 49549093528     PISSN: 00472786     EISSN: 14679833     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9833.2006.00348.x     Document Type: Review

References (34)

1. James Joyce, Ulysses (London: Penguin, 1992 [1922]), p. 42.
2. Andrew Simms, Ecological Debt: The Health of the Planet and the Wealth of Nations (London: Pluto Press, 2005).
3. See Rawls's highly pertinent discussion of what he terms "problems of extension" in "The Law of Peoples," in Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 531.
4. Nigel W. Arnell, "Climate Change and Water Resources: A Global Perspective," in Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change, ed. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 167.
5. Anthony Nyong and Isabelle Niang-Diop, "Impacts of Climate Change in the Tropics: The African Experience," in Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change, ed. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 237.
6. Bill Hare, "Relationship between Increases in Global Mean Temperature and Impacts on Ecosystems, Food Production, Water and Socio-economic Systems," in Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change, ed. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 179.
7. Anthony McMichael and Andrew Githeko, "Chapter 9: Human Health," in Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability-Contribution of Working Group II to the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. James J. McCarthy et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 466: cf. pp. 463-67.
8. P. C. D. Milly, K. A. Dunne, and A. V. Vecchia, "Global Pattern of Trends in Streamflow and Water Availability in a Changing Climate," Nature 438, no. 7066 (2005): 347.
9. The Causal Account is similar to, but importantly different from, what Dale Jamieson calls "the causal paradigm" in his "Global Responsibilities: Ethics, Public Health, and Global Environmental Change," Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 5 (1998): 116-17.
10. Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain, Global Warming in an Unequal World-A Case of Environmental Colonialism (New Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment, 1991).
11. Simms, Ecological Debt.
12. Henry Shue, "Global Environment and International Inequality," International Affairs 75, no. 3 (1999): 533-37.
13. See, for example, Eric Neumayer, "In Defence of Historical Accountability for Greenhouse Gas Emissions," Ecological Economics 33 (2000): 186.
14. A nice example is given by Partha Dasgupta. Dasgupta writes "that in Brazil the exemption from taxation of virtually all agricultural income, allied to the fact that logging is regarded as proof of land occupancy, has provided incentives to the rich to acquire forests and then to deforest the land," Human Well-Being and the Natural Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 114 (footnote 25 omitted).
15. Neumayer writes: "where boundary changes have occurred, as in the case of the former Soviet Union, there is no reason why a new nation-state should not be held accountable for emissions that were undertaken on the territory within its current boundaries," in his "In Defence of Historical Accountability," 189.
16. Axel Gosseries, "Historical Emissions and Free-Riding," Ethical Perspectives 11, no.1 (2004): 36-60, especially pp. 42-46 and also pp. 46-53.
17. See also Neumayer, "In Defence of Historical Accountability," 189
18. and Shue, "Global Environment and International Inequality," 536-37.
19. See, more generally, the canonical treatment of "the principle of fairness" by Rawls in A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 96-98.
20. This conception of what it means to benefit someone is equivalent to what Derek Parfit terms "[t]he Two-State Requirement" where this states that "[w]e benefit someone only if we cause him to be better off than he would otherwise at that time have been," Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 487: cf. further pp. 487-88.
21. For this reasoning, see Parfit, Reasons and Persons, chap. 16,
22. and Thomas Schwartz "Obligations to Posterity," in Obligations to Future Generations, eds. R. I. Sikora and Brian Barry (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1978), 3-13.
23. For an interesting non-consequentialist response to Parfit, which draws on Scanlon's contractualism, see Rahul Kumar, "Who Can Be Wronged?" Philosophy and Public Affairs, 31, no. 2 (2003): 98-118.
24. This argument is made by John Broome, Ethics out of Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 168,
25. and similar thoughts are expressed by David Heyd, Genethics: Moral Issues in the Creation of People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 30-31 and 122-24.
26. Parfit also anticipates this argument (but does not commit himself to it): cf. Reasons and Persons, 358 and, more generally, 487-90.
27. For a clear statement of the argument in the text and a challenge to it, see Nils Holtug's interesting "On the Value of Coming into Existence," Journal of Ethics 5, no. 4 (2001), especially p. 370ff and his formulation of premises (1)-(3) on pp. 371-72.
28. The argument in the text is also denied by Alan Carter, "Can We Harm Future People?" Environmental Values 10 (2001): 451, footnote 18.
29. Gosseries, note, maintains that benefiting from industrialization only generates duties of reparation if performing the cost of doing so does not exceed the benefit one has gained, "Historical Emissions and Free-Riding," 47 and 49-52. See also his discussion of what should happen if the costs exceed the benefits (pp. 49-52).
30. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), 152-53 and 230-31.
31. Although he does not make this distinction, I believe that one of Thomas Pogge's arguments can be classified as a Negative argument in the sense that I am using it. See Pogge's discussion of historic wrongs in "A Global Resources Dividend," in Ethics of Consumption: The Good Life, Justice, and Global Stewardship, ed. David A. Crocker and Toby Linden (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Little-field, 1998), 509
32. and "Real World Justice," Journal of Ethics 9 (2005): 38-39 and 41.
33. See Simon Caney, "Cosmopolitan Justice, Responsibility and Global Climate Change," Leiden Journal of International Law 18, no. 4 (2005): 747-75.
34. Indeed I have argued elsewhere that there is a human right not to suffer from the ill-effects of global climate change. See "Cosmopolitan Justice, Rights and Global Climate Change," Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 9, no. 2 (2006): 255-78.