Kenneth Shockley

Sourcing Stability in a Time of Climate Change

Anthropogenic climate change poses a direct and imminent threat to the stability of modern society. Recent reports of the probable consequences of climate change paint a grim picture; they describe a world environmentally much less stable than the world to which we have become accustomed. As we begin to adapt to our changing climate, we will need to identify new sources for the stability necessary for a flourishing society. I suggest that this stability should come from the ideals of the good life we seek to promote when we focus on capabilities, on the substantial freedoms humans need to flourish. These ideals serve as a stable foundation for well-being in a time of great environmental and social instability; they should serve as guides for our policies, practices and institutions. I conclude by appealing to capabilities as a means of integrating well-being into our adaptation strategies, and show how doing so may well provide a way of formulating a powerful moral justification for adaptation strategies appropriate for both the developed and the developing world.

COP 20 Lima: The ethical dimension of climate negotiations on the way to Paris–Issues, challenges, prospects

In December 2014, 196 Parties convened in Lima for the 20 session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 20). The meeting in Lima was, in many respects, a turning point in the history of climate negotiations. At COP 17, held in Durban in 2011, a four-year accelerated round of negotiations, known as the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action, had been launched. Parties entered this round with the objective of reaching an international agreement by COP 21 in December 2015, in Paris. Lima was a turning point because, while the round of negotiations started off almost with an open slate, some of the key elements of the new agreement’s architecture took shape by the end of the conference in Lima, and the previously inchoate Paris agreement, the successor to the Kyoto Protocol, began to take shape. At the meeting’s outset, both the content and the structure of the new agreement were left deliberately open. The only feature adopted from the outset was a desire to expand the global effort, and to do so in a manner that would result in universal participation. The idea is that every nation is to take part in the global climate effort, with no pre-packaged distributions of burdens. Other than this, not much was determined about the terms of cooperation the new agreement would put in place. The idea was that these terms would be fashioned through negotiations. And it was in Lima that the key elements of the new agreement, which would set the stage for the post-2020 global effort on climate change, were to be written down into a preliminary draft. After two nights of overtime, and through tough negotiations and arduous work, the parties agreed on what became known as the Lima Call for Climate Action. The elements of the new agreement are not yet completely finalized, and many of its aspects remain to be developed and refined. But some of the key features are now becoming clear. These can be summarized as follows:

NIMBY, Agent-Relative Reasons and Public Reason: An Open Peer Commentary on Simon Feldman and Derek Turner's ‘Why Not NIMBY?’

NIMBY claims have certainly been vilified. But, as Feldman and Turner point out, one cannot condemn all NIMBY claims without condemning all appeals to partiality. This suggests that any moral problem with NIMBY claims stems not from their status as NIMBY claims but from an underlying illegitimate appeal to partiality. I suggest that if we are to distinguish illegitimate from legitimate appeals to partiality we should look to what might morally justify the sort of agent-relative reasons that can be expressed as a part of public morality. However, if this serves to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate appeals to partiality, the scope for justifiable NIMBY claims is significantly reduced. NIMBY claims require special justification, just as do appeals to the appropriate form of agent-relative reasons. NIMBY appeals to the value of a particular place may very well be morally acceptable, but not merely in virtue of being significant to someone.

Preference Aggregation and Individual Development Rights

It is both a moral tragedy and a travesty of social justice that responses to present unacceptable levels of Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) often involve constraining development, and that the burden of this constraint tends to fall most heavily on those most in need of that development. With this in mind, Baer et al. formulate their response to climate change with a noble goal (Baer, Athanasiou, Kartha & KempBenedict, 2008). They say, ‘we seek to ensure that the emergent climate regime does not worsen the condition of the world’s poor majority; yet we also seek to use the climate crisis to cast light on the broader issues of development and inequality’ (Baer, 2009, p. 268). Their account of Greenhouse Development Rights (GDRs) provides a burden sharing framework that takes into account both the capacity of a country to pay and the responsibility that country has for the present level of GHGs. More distinctively, and more significantly given their noble goal, the authors’ account focuses on the capability of individuals within a given country to contribute to efforts at curbing Greenhouse Gases, with this capability spelled out in terms of purchase power parity (PPP). If an individual’s income lies below a PPP threshold level, indicating they are in need of ‘development’, any responsibility that individual might otherwise have to contribute to GHG reduction efforts is trumped by a right to develop. Moreover, the development threshold applies to everyone, serving as a sort of standard deduction when responsibilities are determined. While the policies advocated under this proposed framework involve distributing obligations to pay for climate change among nations, and the basis for that distribution involves aggregating the PPP-adjusted capacities and responsibilities of individuals, the right to develop is said to be held solely by individuals. The advantages of this account are clear: the focus on individuals allows for the very real social justice concerns that motivate the authors to be addressed through the framework. The right to develop is tied to those individuals in the most need, and

Environmental Policy With Integrity: A Lesson from the Discursive Dilemma

In response to what has been called the discursive dilemma, Christian List has argued that the nature of the public agenda facing deliberative bodies indicates the appropriate form of decision procedure or deliberative process. In this paper I consider the particular case of environmental policy where we are faced with pressures not only from deliberators and stakeholders, but also in response to dynamic changes in the environment itself. As a consequence of this dilemma I argue that insofar as the focus of a policy forming body is on the formation of viable environmental policy, rather than on a set of pre-existent ideological commitments, deliberative agents should be responsive as a unified body to the pressures of precedent, the best available science, and their own best individual judgments. In the case of environmental policy the dilemma pressures deliberative bodies to display what Ronald Dworkin has called integrity even in cases where this requires those deliberative bodies to sacrifice being maximally responsive to the preferences of individual deliberators.