Lukas H. Meyer

Climate justice and historical emissions

Climate change can be interpreted as a unique case of historical injustice involving issues of both intergenerational and global justice. We split the issue into two separate questions. First, how should emission rights be distributed? Second, who should come up for the costs of coping with climate change? We regard the first question as being an issue of pure distributive justice and argue on prioritarian grounds that the developing world should receive higher per capita emission rights than the developed world. This is justified by the fact that the latter already owns a larger share of benefits associated with emission generating activities because of its past record of industrialisation. The second question appears to be an issue of compensatory justice. After defining what we mean by compensation, we show that different kinds of compensatory principles run into problems when used to justify payments by historical emitters of the North to people suffering from climate change in the South. As an alternative, we propose to view payments from wealthy countries for adaptation to climate change in vulnerable countries rather as a measure based on concerns of global distributive justice.

Distributive Justice and Climate Change. The Allocation of Emission Rights

Abstract The emission of greenhouse gases causes climate change. Therefore, many support a global cap on emissions. How then should the emissions allowed under this cap be distributed? We first show that above average past emissions cannot be used to justify a right to above average current emissions. We then sketch three basic principles of distributive justice (egalitarianism, prioritarianism, and sufficientarianism) and argue, first, that prioritarian standards are the most plausible and, second, that they speak in favour of giving people of developing countries higher emission rights than people of industrialised countries. In order to support this point it has to be shown, inter alia, in what ways the higher past emissions of industrialised countries are relevant for today’s distribution of emission rights.

How legitimate expectations matter in climate justice

Expectations play an important role in how people plan their lives and pursue their projects. People living in highly industrialized countries share a way of life that comes with high levels of emissions. Their expectations to be able to continue their projects imply their holding expectations to similarly high future levels of personal emissions. We argue that the frustration or undermining of these expectations would cause them significant harm. Further, the article investigates under what conditions people can be thought to hold legitimate expectations, in particular about permissible levels of future emissions. We distinguish differing theories of understanding these conditions, namely authority-based and justice-based theories, that each allows us to systematically distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate expectations. Furthermore, with respect to individuals’ future permissible emissions we give several reasons for holding that such theories cannot identify a particular expectation to a specific level of personal emissions as the only legitimate one. Finally, we argue that the set of legitimate expectations that people hold with respect to a just and effective solution to climate change has normative significance in at least two ways: the differing but equally legitimate expectations ought to be taken into account when justifying what could count as such a solution and when determining the just way of arriving at and implementing such a solution.

Individual Expectations and Climate Justice

Abstract Many people living in highly industrialised countries and elsewhere emit greenhouse gases at a certain high level as a by-product of their activities, and they expect to be able to continue to emit at that level. This level is far above the just per capita level. We investigate whether that expectation is legitimate and permissible. We argue that the expectation is epistemically legitimate. Given certain assumptions, we can also think of it as politically legitimate. Also, the expectation is shown to be morally permissible but with major qualifications. The interpretation of the significance of the expectation is compatible with the understanding that historical emissions should count in terms of fairly distributing the benefits of emission-generating activities over people’s lifetimes but constrains the way in which we may collectively respond to climate change.

Historical Injustice and the Right of Return

The argument presented in this essay has been theoretical and mainly negative: the two main sources of doubt about the validity of claims for reparation owing to past injustices do not undermine the validity of the right of return of the Palestinian refugees. Neither the questions arising from the non-identity problem nor those arising from the supersession thesis significantly undermine the Palestinian refugees’ claims to reparations and their right of return. First, the common understanding of harm and its accompanying notion of reparation and compensation are applicable to those Palestinians who were forcefully and deliberately expelled from their homeland as well as to their descendants with respect to the harm done to them owing to the lack of effective measures of reparations for the initial harm. Second, even if we allow for the conceptual possibility of historic supersession of injustices, it seems highly unlikely that the Palestinians’ right of return has been superseded. Morally speaking, there does not seem to be a compelling case for considering the ongoing effect of the expulsion of the Palestinians from their homeland as just given current circumstances. However, this essay has not addressed the question of how the Palestinians ought to exercise their right of return or whether they (or many of them) might have good or compelling reasons to refrain from realising their right of return. Responding to this question would require consideration not only how best to serve the interests underlying the Palestinians’ right of return, but also how to respect and to accommodate the legitimate interests and rights of others, including the Jewish right to self-determination. Last but not least, we would need to pragmatically assess how best to serve the goal of establishing a legitimate and stable political order in the region.

Philosophy of Justice: Extending Liberal Justice in Space and Time

In this chapter, we introduce and sketch central themes in the contemporary political philosophy of justice. We restrict ourselves to one particular tradition, namely the one that can loosely be called “analytical political philosophy,” and for reasons we explain in the chapter, we take the work of John Rawls as the starting point of our interpretation. Even with this restriction, it is not possible to take into account all important modern developments within this tradition. Therefore, we further restrict our focus to some specific questions and areas. In particular, we first discuss the Rawlsian claim that the basic structure is the first or primary subject of justice. Discussions of the basic structure and the implications of this Rawlsian view have been central and agenda-setting in the modern development of analytical political philosophy. Consequently, we examine prominent and differing interpretations of both (a) how the basic structure is to be understood and (b) what it means for the basic structure to be the primary subject of justice. On this basis, we then discuss different claims regarding the scope of principles of justice, in particular distributive justice. This then leads to a discussion of the extensions of justice in space and time, of whether and, if so, how principles of justice developed to apply within single societies could apply to relations between people who are not members of the same state or who belong to non-overlapping generations. In recent years, these two areas of international (or global) and intergenerational justice have seen a comparatively large increase in interest. We conclude by outlining a few additional research questions that we think are, and ought to be, of central importance in thinking philosophically about justice, in particular when the research is meant to contribute to an understanding of the relevance of ideals of justice in addressing the reality of a less-than-just status quo.

Climate Justice: Past Emissions and the Present Allocation of Emission Rights

The emission of so-called greenhouse gases have caused, and will cause, climate change with highly unequal consequences for people depending on, inter alia, where and when they live. We assume the need for a global cap on emissions as a matter of intergenerational justice and argue for the plausibility of an equal per capita distribution of the benefits from emission generating activities over the whole lifespan of individuals. We investigate how past emissions ought to be taken into account in distributing emission rights among currently living people. We distinguish three objections against taking into account historical and past emissions (reflecting the non-identity problem, the problem of limited knowledge of those who caused the emissions and the problem of currently living people being in no position to have hindered these emissions). We sketch two ways of taking into account some of the consequences of historical and past emissions that are compatible with normative individualism and a third way that relies on considering states as transgenerational entities that can be considered liable inter-temporally.

The Timing of Benefits of Climate Policies. Reconsidering the Opportunity Cost Argument

We examine the Opportunity Cost Argument (OCA) for discounting in detail. We distinguish several understandings of discounting and claim that discounting is supported by the OCA in the sense that the timing of the benefits of a policy affects whether we have good reason to pursue this policy. The basic logic of the argument – illustrated by the example of climate policy – consists in the fact that the resources used for a certain strategy of mitigating climate change could also be used for alternative investments, such as an adaptation strategy or other kinds of mitigation strategies. These alternative investments might yield even larger returns when compounded over time. The OCA can do without a number of premises often associated with discounting. In particular, it does not presuppose pure time preference. However, the OCA does presuppose strong premises as far as substitutability is concerned. The argument supporting the OCA is also shown to be relevant for the counterpart of discounting, compounding in the case of present compensation for past injustices.

Introduction: Legitimacy, justice and public international law. Three perspectives on the debate

Questions of legitimacy have long been central to both political philosophy and political practice. It is not merely vanity that leads dictators of virtually all stripes to first decide to hold elections and then announce that they have won 96 per cent of the vote in them. Saddam Hussein, for instance, held a referendum in 2002 on whether he should continue as ruler of Iraq for the next seven years, and after the election was held it turned out that out of 11,445,638 eligible voters, every single one voted in favour. The natural question to ask is: why bother? Why bother to hold sham elections with sham results when you hold power anyway? There are many possible answers, but two are especially relevant here. The effect of legitimacy is, or can be, twofold. First, it makes it easier to exercise the power one does possess. Second, and as important, it can often increase the scope of the power one possesses. Legitimacy matters

Assessing Policies of Responding to the Risk and Impacts of Earthquakes from a Justice Perspective

The paper addresses two important issues in assessing policies of responding to the risk of and the damages caused by earthquakes. First, the complex uncertainties concerning the occurrence and impacts of earthquakes raise difficult issues from the perspective of a philosophical theory of justice when assessing policies to reduce the impact of possible earthquakes. We propose a particular understanding of what justice requires, namely risk-averse weak sufficientarianism, and show how this understanding can justify the reduction of the imposition of risks of harms. Second, we address how one should respond to unavoided and unavoidable damages caused by earthquakes. Here we suggest that we should view such damages primarily as a reason for redistribution, and therefore as a matter of distributive justice.