Andries De Smet

The delegated authority model misused as a strategy of disengagement in the case of climate change

The characterisation of anthropogenic climate change as a violation of basic human rights is gaining wide recognition. Many people believe that tackling this problem is exclusively the job of governments and supranational institutions (especially the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change). This argument can be traced back to the delegated authority model, according to which the legitimacy of political institutions depends on their ability to solve problems that are difficult to address at the individual level. Since the institutions created to tackle climate change fail to do so, their legitimacy is under great pressure and can only be saved by considerations of feasibility. We argue that democratically elected representatives are able to claim that a more robust climate policy is unfeasible, but only because the mandate we as citizens grant them is very restrictive. Instead of shifting responsibility for the thoroughly inadequate response to climate change fully to political representatives, we should highlight the failure of the political community as a whole to fulfil its responsibility at the input-side of the delegation of authority. When individual voters fail to fulfil the minimal obligation to at least vote for parties that explicitly advocate robust climate policies, they cannot hide behind the delegated authority argument, but should accept their complicity in the massive violations of basic human rights caused by the failure to successfully tackle climate change.

Climate Change, Human Rights and Moral Responsibility

This chapter sketches the problems of climate change and allocation of the responsibility for tackling it. In view of the threats to key human rights posed by observed and projected climatic changes, climate change is conceptualized as a moral harm. We explore how the burdens involved in remedying the problem should be allocated, focusing on the principle of moral responsibility that plays a central role in common-sense morality. The responsibilities of individual emitters have been underestimated because important doubts exist about the agency of individuals in complex global dynamics such as climate change. We contrast this view with the observation that people can psychologically reconstruct their contribution to climate change, in order to evade moral responsibility for it.

Understanding the Motivational Gap

This chapter explores two complementary explanations for the motivational gap. We argue that the first explanation — referring to the inadequacy of our moral framework to capture climate change as an important moral problem — remains incomplete, since individuals can effectively be identified as morally responsible for their luxury emissions. Second, the complexity of climate change and doubts about individual agency are overly emphasized, enabling emitters to act out of self-interest. Through the influence of the prevailing liberal-capitalist worldview, self-interested pursuits have become equated with wealth accumulation and consumption. Climate change challenges the inviolable status conferred to these materialistic freedoms, requiring emitters to resort to moral disengagement in order to be able to maintain a consumptive lifestyle without having to accept moral responsibility for the resultant harms.

The Phenomenology of Agency in Climate Change

Most objections against holding individual emitters responsible for climate change are closely related to the characteristic way in which people experience themselves as agents with causal powers. Within this phenomenology of agency, acts have primacy over omissions; near effects have primacy over remote effects; and individual effects have primacy over group effects. We describe how these features affect our thinking about individual responsibility for climate change and argue that the predominant characterization of climate change as a matter of omissions, remote effects and group effects is deceitful. Arguments along these lines do not convincingly exonerate individual emitters from moral responsibility for their luxury emissions; although the complexity of climate change undeniably challenges our moral judgement system, it also provides a convenient opportunity for moral disengagement.

Addressing the Motivational Gap and Tackling Moral Disengagement

In this chapter, we tentatively suggest some strategies to increase emitters’ motivation to accept moral responsibility for the consequences of their luxury emissions, and to accordingly acknowledge their remedial responsibility for tackling climate change. First, emitters’ motivation can be increased by enhancing their moral judgement on the basis of common-sense morality, or by invoking alternative moral values. Second, the motivational force of the underlying reasons for deploying mechanisms of moral disengagement can be reduced by encouraging people to evaluate and redefine their self-interested motives or by addressing the perceived demandingness of morality. Third, we argue that the propensity for moral disengagement should itself be tackled as well.

Globalization and Responsibility for Human Rights

In this article, we examine to what extent globalization has altered responsibilities for human rights. We give priority to negative human rights and take the violation of these rights as the baseline for determining harm and injustice. We will focus on the global economic order and on climate change and examine whether these aspects of globalization provide us with new reasons to value our relationships with distant others. We argue that, if a relationship of harm is established, fulfilling positive duties is no longer a matter of general charity but has become a special obligation of justice. Accordingly, human rights and corresponding obligations gain important normative weight. We propose to use the “vulnerability presumption principle” as a guideline in determining whether or not such a relationship of harm is established.