Book contents
- Climate Justice and Historical Emissions
- Climate Justice and Historical Emissions
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Climate Ethics, Affirmative Action, and Unjust Enrichment
- 2 Historical Responsibility and Climate Change
- 3 Historical Emissions
- 4 How Legal Systems Deal with Issues of Responsibility for Past Harmful Behavior
- 5 Asking Beneficiaries to Pay for Past Pollution
- 6 Benefiting from Unjust Acts and Benefiting from Injustice
- 7 A Luck-Based Moral Defense of Grandfathering
- 8 In Defense of Emissions Egalitarianism?
- 9 In the Name of Political Possibility
- 10 Right to Development and Historical Emissions
- Index
- References
2 - Historical Responsibility and Climate Change
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 February 2017
Book contents
- Climate Justice and Historical Emissions
- Climate Justice and Historical Emissions
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Climate Ethics, Affirmative Action, and Unjust Enrichment
- 2 Historical Responsibility and Climate Change
- 3 Historical Emissions
- 4 How Legal Systems Deal with Issues of Responsibility for Past Harmful Behavior
- 5 Asking Beneficiaries to Pay for Past Pollution
- 6 Benefiting from Unjust Acts and Benefiting from Injustice
- 7 A Luck-Based Moral Defense of Grandfathering
- 8 In Defense of Emissions Egalitarianism?
- 9 In the Name of Political Possibility
- 10 Right to Development and Historical Emissions
- Index
- References
Summary
This chapter concentrates on refuting the most serious objections to the claim that people of developed countries owe reparation for their historical role in causing climate change: that ignorance is a sufficient reason for lack of responsibility and that present citizens cannot be held responsible for what their predecessors did. I argue that morally responsible agents can be required to make reparation for harms for which they are not culpable and that citizens are subject to intergenerational requirements of justice. There is a good case for claiming that developed countries ought to make reparation for historical emissions, but what they owe must be determined by reference to present circumstances.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Climate Justice and Historical Emissions , pp. 46 - 60Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2017
References
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