Research assignment

Are individual lifestyle changes needed to mitigate harm from climate change? Or would national policies be sufficient? As the recent fiery debates about ‘flight shame’ and ‘meat shame’ illustrate, it is unclear who has a duty to do exactly what with respect to climate change. One reason for this is that a convincing ethics addressing apparent collective harm problems has yet to be formulated. A collective harm problem involves many individuals acting in a way that leads to serious harm, where each individual’s contribution is negligible. According to some philosophers, climate change is a collective harm problem, one that is theoretically and practically perplexing. How can an individual have a duty to reduce her carbon emissions when the consequences of her doing so appear to be negligible?

Addressing this question, two approaches have evolved in the literature. On what we call the bottom-up approach, individuals have direct duties to reduce their emissions in order to prevent harm. The approach defends these duties by trying to explain how, despite appearances to the contrary, an individual directly causes non-negligible harm by emitting and can mitigate this harm through lifestyle changes. However, even if we accept this approach and think that climate change is not purely a collective harm problem as far as individual emissions are concerned, it is unclear which duties the approach implies. Individual choices (such as foregoing air travel or refraining from having a second child) may be unduly costly, and uncoordinated individual acts seem insufficient to adequately address climate change. For these reasons, our hypothesis is that the best version of the bottom-up approach will require individuals to coordinate their actions.

On what we call the top-down approach, collectives such as states have duties to prevent collective harm. Individuals’ duties are not direct but are derived from these collective duties. This guarantees that the duties of individuals who belong to the same collective are coordinated. The top-down approach is thus a promising account with regard to solving collective action problems. However, the top-down approach is faced with two major challenges. The first is to show that collectives, and not only individuals, are bearers of moral duties. The second is to show how collective duties give rise to individual duties of group members.

Thus, the state of the art does not offer a satisfactory explanation of our duties in the face of climate change and gives insufficient guidance. Our hypothesis is that both the individual and collective perspectives are needed for a comprehensive approach. We call our approach an ethics of coordination because it says that individuals have not only direct duties to avoid causing harm, but also duties to coordinate their actions with others that derive from the expected effects of individuals acting together as a group.

The theoretical task is to justify a duty to coordinate and determine its relationship with direct individual duties. The practical task is to apply the approach to climate change.