The event is hosted by Practical Philosophy, University of Helsinki. Venue: Metsätalo room 10, Unioninkatu 40, Helsinki.
Thursday 5 September
9:30 – 9:45 Welcome
9:45 – 10:45 Elizabeth Ashford (University of St Andrews)
A shared duty of humanity to coordinate, correlative to the right to have rights
There has been much recent debate about whether anthropogenic climate change should be seen as a human rights violation. On the one hand, since it threatens the biophysical bases for subsistence and physical security of millions already and of numberless members of future generations, it poses a pervasive threat to the enjoyment of all human rights. On the other hand, justified and meaningful appeals to the notion of a human rights violation require identifying a breach of obligation, and identifying the agent responsible for that breach of obligation. And while anthropogenic climate change is the predictable and avoidable combined effect of ongoing patterns of human behaviour, much of that combined effect cannot be attributed to particular, identifiable breaches of obligation by particular individual or collective agents.
I argue that we should broaden our traditional conception of the nature of duties correlative to fundamental human rights. On that traditional conception, such duties must belong to one or other of two exhaustive categories: interactional duties, held by each individual agent considered one by one, and collective duties, held by existing collective agents (such as states or corporations). I focus on the fundamental negative human right not to be deprived by others of reasonably secure access to the means of subsistence (including safe air, sufficient safe drinking water, and fertile land). I argue that this right, in addition to imposing interactional and collective duties, also imposes on the rest of humanity a shared duty of basic justice to coordinate as necessary to enact to all the duty not to jeopardise, plunder or destroy persons’ access to the means of subsistence. Fulfilling this shared duty requires reforming our existing moral, economic, and legal structures so as to stop the degradation of the global commons (that constitutes the biophysical basis of subsistence) caused by our current ongoing patterns of behaviour. The content of the shared duty is both determinate and correlative to an uncontroversial and basic human right. Ongoing non-fulfilment of this shared duty should be analysed as a structural violation, which deprives persons of the right to have rights in several respects.
10:45 – 11:00 Break
11:00 – 12:00 Mark Budolfson (University of Texas at Austin / IFFS)
When and why should nations take unilateral action to mitigate global collective threats? In search of a plausible general theory for nuclear arms, artificial intelligence, climate change, and beyond
Should nations take unilateral action to mitigate global collective threats even when other nations are unwilling to follow suit? For example, should individual nations unilaterally reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, or reduce their own nuclear stockpiles, or impede their own development of artificial intelligence? The answer to these questions about unilateral mitigation turns in part on the philosophical question of how and why reasons for action in a collective action problem depend on the (non)cooperation of others. It also depends in part on other philosophical questions, such as how nations should take the interests of non-citizens into account in domestic policymaking, how different degrees of capacity, wealth, and responsibility for the problem should be taken into account, and other fundamentally normative issues. It also depends on descriptive issues, such how unilateral action by one nation would increase or decrease future mitigation actions by other nations (such as leakage in the climate case, or incentivizing aggression in the nuclear arms case), as well as other facts about self-interested reasons for and against mitigation that might exist (such as air quality health co-benefits for a nation’s own citizens in the climate case, in addition to the general economic impacts of mitigation). I try to make some progress toward a plausible answer via systematic principles to take these factors into account, and I discuss some of the likely upshots. I also aim to show that reasons for unilateral mitigation are more complicated than they may initially appear from any plausible normative perspective, even for those who are thoroughly committed to narrowly welfarist or deontological views.
12:00 – 13:30 Lunch
13:30 – 14:30 Vuko Andrić (Linköping University / IFFS)
Actualist Rule Consequentialism and Its Problems
According to rule consequentialism, an action is wrong if and only if the action is forbidden by the authoritative moral code. The predominant version of rule consequentialism, idealist rule consequentialism, holds that the moral code whose adoption would have the prospectively best consequences is authoritative. By contrast, actualist rule consequentialism focuses on actually adopted rules or on actual patterns of behavior to determine the authoritative moral code. But since actually adopted rules and actual patterns of behavior can be suboptimal or even morally horrendous, actualist rule consequentialism needs mechanisms to avoid counterintuitive implications. This paper discusses the efficacy and grounds of such mechanisms.
14:30 – 14:45 Break
14:45 – 15:45 Säde Hormio (University of Helsinki / IFFS)
Collective responsibility of national oil companies
States are widely perceived as the main actors in tackling climate change. What is discussed less is that many biggest polluters are also either fully or partially state-owned. In a national oil company (NOC), the government controls the company, usually through special ministers appointed to oversee its operations. How should we conceptualise the collective responsibility of NOCs? Parrish (2009) likens the responsibility of citizens of democratic states to that of shareholders; citizens own their state in a certain sense. Pasternak (2021) describes state policies as a product of ‘massive collective action’, where citizens intentionally participate in their democratic state by willingly orienting themselves around the state’s authority. However, the situation is different in non-democratic authoritarian regimes, where such willing orientation is harder to gauge, so responsibility seems not to distribute much wider than to the ruling elite. But what is the responsibility of citizens of democratic states for the impact on the climate through NOCs?
15:45 – 16:00 Break
16:00 – 17:00 Tim Campbell (IFFS)
On one of the most impactful choices an individual can make regarding climate change
Individual lifestyle choices make a difference, at least in expectation, to how much CO2 is emitted into the atmosphere. In this talk, I consider the estimates given by Wynes and Nicholas regarding the reduction in CO2 associated with different individual lifestyle choices, such as eating a plant-based diet, flying, and living car free. I consider some doubts about their estimates, and then turn to what they take to be the most impactful choice by far, the choice to refrain from having a child. To show that this lifestyle choice warrants special moral consideration, I give a novel argument for the claim that one can be morally required to create an individual with a good life, even when doing so would impose harm on someone else who is already badly off, where the moral requirement is grounded solely in the fact that the newly created individual would have a good life.
Friday 6 September
9:30 – 10:30 Krister Bykvist (Stockholm University / IFFS)
Collective harm cases: Some neglected problems and partial solutions
According to the standard definition of a collective harm case, this is a case in which people together bring about a morally significant outcome, but no individual act seems to make a difference. Individual denialists (Broome’s term) drop the ‘seems’, and dwell on the question of whether one can have moral reason to act, if one would not make a difference. I shall show that there is more to this than meets the eye. I will present some neglected problems and suggest some partial solutions that an objective teleological moral theory can provide, especially if moral uncertainty is taken into account.
10:30 – 10:45 Break
10:45 – 11:45 Christian Barry and Garrett Cullity (Australian National University)
Regulated Responsibilities: Should Sub-National Actors Adopt Net Zero Targets?
Should firms, universities, municipalities, and other subnational actors adopt net zero targets? It is widely accepted that states are responsible for reducing their carbon emissions, and that failing to do so involves imposing excessive risk on the climate vulnerable. Given this, there is a sense in which the answer to our opening question is straightforward: all else being equal, subnational actors can be responsible for making NZ commitments that states can be, and for the very same reasons: if they emit without making corresponding removals, they too can be accountable for imposing excessive risk on the climate vulnerable. We shall argue, however, that all else is not equal between states and subnational actors. In particular, the ethical situation of subnational actors is affected substantially by the fact that they are subject to the regulatory authority of states. We show how the existence, scope, and degree of general compliance with national regulation can affect whether subnational actors are morally responsible for adopting net zero targets.
11:45 – 13:15 Lunch
13:15 – 14:15 Olle Torpman (IFFS)
Transferred Outcome Responsibility: From Collectives to Individuals in Collective Impact Cases
This paper discusses the notion of outcome responsibility and its potential to explain how individuals bear responsibility in collective impact cases, with a focus on climate change. I start with a clarification of the notion of outcome responsibility, and distinguish it from the notions of causal and moral responsibility, respectively. Roughly, outcome responsibility concerns attributive responsibility for outcomes in particular, meaning that it concerns the question of which agents should be credited or debited with which outcomes. I then introduce the notion of transferred outcome responsibility, which concerns the attribution of an outcome to an agent where the outcome has previously been attributed to another agent. Thereafter, I argue that this notion allows us to transfer outcome responsibility from collectives to individuals in collective impact cases such as climate change. When combined with a normative principle, such as the Polluter Pays Principle (that cannot by itself explain how individuals are responsible in collective impact cases), this lets us determine an individual’s prospective moral responsibility in the collective impact case of climate change.
14:15 – 15:15 Simo Kyllönen and Ninni Suni (University of Helsinki)
Coordination and the ethics of authority
Coordination of individual action is frequently used as justification for political authority. This justification is appealing, for instance, in many cases of collective harm, in which individuals’ uncoordinated unilateral acts are likely to be self-defeating. The general idea of the justification is explained by Joseph Raz’s (1986) well-known normal justification thesis (NJT): individual citizens are more likely to comply with reasons that apply to them independently when they take authority’s instructions to be binding and follow them, rather than trying to follow those reasons directly (Raz 1986). While appealing, the Razian justification for political authority has raised several critical questions. According to Stephen Darwall’s (2010) powerful argument, NJT is only able to ground an epistemic authority, that is, an authority to advise us to do something that we have an independent reason to do. But NJT fails to ground the practical (or political) authority to tell us to do it. This is so, in Darwall’s view, because the practical authority to give binding directives (rather than advice) requires not only that we have a reason to suspend our own judgement and follow the authority’s directives but also that we are accountable to the authority for doing so.
Fabienne Peter (2023) has recently argued for an account of epistemic authority that she claims to create accountability to an epistemic authority to follow its advice and revise our beliefs for action accordingly. For instance, if there exists a robust expertise on climate crisis, how it threatens people’s lives and livelihoods and how it can be managed by effectively coordinating individual action, individuals are accountable for basing their action on that expertise. We argue that the argument fails, however, since it only works by assuming accountability relations that already ground the practical/political authority of the expertise in the first place. Even if following an epistemic authority is necessary for fulfilling our moral obligations to others (e.g., not to harm them), we are only morally accountable to those who have a valid claim of us (e.g., not to be harmed). The role of an epistemic authority remains merely instrumental. Thus, the genuine ground of political authority and its ability to make binding coordination instructions on us is essentially grounded in citizens’ reciprocal authority to make valid claims of one another and hold others’ and oneself accountable for complying with those claims.
15:15 – 15:30 Break
15:30 – 16:30 Karsten Klint Jensen (University of Copenhagen / IFFS)
Is Climate Change a Collective Harm Problem? Review of Julia Nefsky’s Arguments
Julia Nefsky claims that climate change is a collective harm problem and this claim is accepted by many philosophers. But how does she justify it, and what are the consequences if it is true? This paper attempts a systematic reconstruction and assessment of her arguments.
A collective harm problem occurs when “people collectively cause a morally significant [harmful] outcome but no individual act seems to make a difference”. However, this would only be a problem if what seems were actually true. Nefsky argues only indirectly for this by attempting to refute arguments to the contrary.
Her most important argument in this regard consists in pointing out that if an act has a very small impact on climate change it need not imply a small (possibly imperceptible) harm. But if she is right about this, it raises a question (posed by John Broome): how can many acts each involving zero harm add up to a significant harm? Maybe her proposal of how you can help bringing an outcome about without making a difference can provide an answer. Kagan’s ‘triggering’ model, she argues, cannot. In order to assess this debate, I shall bring the conflicting underlying assumptions about aggregation of harm into the open.
While Kagan’s model does not answer the problem about imperceptible harms, Nefsky does give it some credibility for climate change when it comes to harmful events resulting from thresholds being crossed. However, this ‘expected utility approach’ faces a dilemma: either it does not work, or if it works, it makes morality too demanding. I shall make clear what it means to claim that the approach works. Next, I demonstrate that the first horn of the dilemma is mistaken. Finally, there is an issue of demandingness, but it sticks deeper than Nefsky realizes, and it cannot be solved by her ‘imperfect duty’-proposal.