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Do rich people rather than rich countries bear the greatest responsibility for climate change? Paul G

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Do rich people rather than rich countries bear the greatest responsibility for climate change? Paul G. Harris and Kenneth Shockley Summary of the debate This debate engages with the question of moral responsibility and climate change. We might agree that the rich carry more responsibility for causing the climate to change than do the poor, but is it rich people or rich countries that should be held to greater account? Paul Harris argues that given the huge inequalities within states—both developed and developing—it should be rich individuals who carry the greatest moral responsibility for tackling climate change, although rich states have enormous responsibilities, too. People’s actions cause greenhouse gases to be emitted and the more one emits the greater ones responsibility. Kenneth Shockley challenges this position by arguing that it is nation states that are the appropriate, and more effective, agents for acting to reduce the risks of climate change. Individuals, especially rich individuals, do have some moral responsibility, but primarily it is states who must accept the greater responsibility for climate change and lead the search for solutions. YES: Rich people ought to behave responsibly (before it’s too late) (Paul G. Harris) Introduction Contrary to received wisdom, countries—that is, nation states—do not cause climate change; people do. People are the agents who actually behave in ways that cause climate change. If every country that currently exists were to be dissolved, climate change would continue to grow worse because the agents of change—people—would continue to behave in ways that directly and indirectly emit greenhouse gases (GHGs) that pollute the atmosphere. In contrast, if every citizen of every country were to disappear, climate change would be addressed to the fullest extent possible. The most basic conceptions of fairness and justice, which even children understand, demand that those who are responsible for causing harm should stop doing so. Those who cause the most harm, especially if they do so voluntarily and for relatively trivial reasons, have the greatest responsibility to stop. With few exceptions, the richer the person the more that person consumes and pollutes and thus the greater that person’s adverse environmental impact. What is more, the richer the person the more that person is capable of choosing to behave differently and the more capable that person is to help others to do likewise—and indeed to aid those who suffer the consequences of pollution. Consequently, rich people have disproportionately greater responsibility for climate Responsibility for climate change 147 change and thus disproportionately greater responsibility to stop making the problem worse. As Simon Caney has argued, ‘the burden of dealing with climate change should rest predominantly with the wealthy of the world, by which I mean af?uent persons in the world (not af?uent countries)’ (Caney, 2005: 770). With riches come responsibilities What does it mean to be a rich person? To be rich is to have ‘abundant possessions and material wealth’, with ‘more than enough to gratify normal needs’ (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). By this de?nition, there are well over one billion rich people around the world. The majority of them live in Europe, North America and other parts of the ‘developed’ world, but at least hundreds of millions of them live within ‘developing’ countries (such as Brazil, China and India). Most readers of this book are likely to be rich. Even if you do not have a large amount of money in the bank, if you have more than enough ‘stuff’ to gratify your needs, you are rich, especially when compared to how billions of people continue to live (more than a few of them in rich countries). Cheeseburgers, fast fashion, luxury possessions, energy-hungry homes, private automobiles, cheap air travel and many other manifestations of af?uent ‘western’ lifestyles are, historically speaking, not normal. Neither are they normal if there is any hope of avoiding catastrophic climate change. To put it melodramatically, if every person who is rich by this de?nition were to drop dead tomorrow, the nominal objectives of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change for the next few decades would probably be realised without any additional effort by countries, rich or poor (cf. Chakravarty et al., 2009). Rich people do matter. Naturally, measured individually, super-rich people matter more than ordinarily rich ones; each rich person is responsible for contributing to climate change and each super-rich person is even more responsible (Otto et al., 2019). Nevertheless, nearly all rich people live and consume like never before in human history (and often have one or more children who will do the same throughout their lives). They live well beyond meeting their needs, polluting the atmosphere in the process. Vitally, the number of people living in this way is growing very rapidly around the world. Without discounting the enormous responsibility of rich countries for climate change, putting all of the responsibility on them is a recipe for dangerous climate change. Even if one believes that rich countries deserve to be blamed (as I do), and even if those countries accept this blame (many of them claim that they do), very few of them have acted on this responsibility to anywhere near the extent that is required to slow global warming and other manifestations of climate change. We have far too little to show for blaming rich countries for climate change. Doing so almost exclusively is neither a practical way of attributing responsibility nor the most morally correct way to do so. Waving the ?ag of responsibility: blaming rich countries Before we can settle on the fairest solutions to the problem, and speci?cally who or what ought to take which actions, we need to decide who or what is most responsible. International negotiations and national policy formulation around climate change have been dominated by the mantra that rich countries ought to be taking responsibility. This idea is at the root of the concept of ‘common but differentiated responsibility’ that underlies international negotiations on climate change: while all countries share responsibility, the rich ones 148 Paul G. Harris and Kenneth Shockley deserve most of it, and they therefore ought to be taking action to cut their climate-changing emissions and to help developing countries cope with the consequences of those emissions. This initial focus on countries as the responsible agents was not irrational. Nearly all other global problems—war and peace, economic development and even most transboundary environmental problems—have been dealt with by countries trying to act collectively. They have often done so successfully. What is more, although states are formally only institutional constructs (a state per se does not have any agency; see Chapter 12), most people identify as nationals of a particular country, they need passports to travel very far internationally and there are physical barriers between many countries. But climate change does not recognise political boundaries. Neither the power of the state nor passport controls nor border walls nor anything else yet devised can stop GHG emissions ‘going global’ and affecting almost every community. No country has yet found a way to immunise itself against the effects of climate change. Such a solution does not exist (although for a counter-argument see Chapter 8). As rich and poor countries trade accusations in international negotiations, and national leaders point to other countries’ inaction to combat climate change as justi?cation for their own lack of action (this is precisely the argument used by governments of Australia and the USA), GHG emissions continue to increase. This is happening even as scientists tell us that we need to all but eliminate them very soon (Xu et al., 2018). Despite several decades of negotiations by countries to solve this problem—starting before most of the readers of this book were born—GHG emissions into the atmosphere continue to rise. It is patently obvious that countries have failed to address climate change effectively and there is no indication that this will change anytime soon. Because the world’s responses to climate change have focused on the rights and responsibilities of countries, resulting international agreements and related national policies have largely ignored the rights and responsibilities of people (see Harris, 2016). Aggressive responses to climate change cannot come from continuing on this pathway. Without major and widespread action by rich people very soon, it seems all but inevitable that climate change will be catastrophic, especially for the world’s poor (see Chapter 1). In addition to the unwillingness of rich countries to act responsibly, a problem with the country-focused attribution of responsibility is that it has let rich people largely off the hook, in both practical and moral terms. Blaming rich countries for climate change has made rich people everywhere lazy. They are waiting for rich country governments to do all of the work of fostering action. Rich people can say to themselves, ‘I have paid my taxes and done what my government has demanded of me. I have ful?lled my responsibility’. But this attitude is wrong both practically and morally: it enables people who contribute disproportionately to the problem to pretend that they are not disproportionately responsible to change their related behaviours. It allows them to imagine that the moral duties fall on other actors. And it allows those rich people who live in developing countries—a smaller number than in developed countries, but one that is growing rapidly—to ignore their responsibilities completely. Is it any wonder that there is so little willingness among citizens to embrace the major changes in their lives that are needed to face climate change squarely? A cosmopolitan debate: responsibilities of the most capable people There is an alternative to the assumption that climate change is primarily the responsibility of rich countries. That alternative can be found in cosmopolitanism, the notion that all Responsibility for climate change 149 human beings belong to a single community, based on a shared morality. Cosmopolitanism attributes responsibility (and rights) to persons (as well as other actors). From a cosmopolitan perspective, people are moral agents who should take responsibility for their actions. Cosmopolitans acknowledge the responsibilities of capable people regardless of the countries in which they reside or hold citizenship. While cosmopolitans would not deny the responsibilities of rich countries, neither would they deny the responsibilities of rich people (Harris, 2016). For cosmopolitans, a rich person in Britain is not, prima facie, any more (or less) responsible for climate change than is a rich person in China. From this perspective, rich people ought not wait for rich countries to act on those countries’ responsibilities for climate change. Rich people are responsible to do what they can to mitigate their own contributions to climate change regardless of what rich countries do. Cosmopolitanism is a useful way to debate climate change. It exposes the reality that many millions of rich people around the world remain under little or no legal or even moral obligation to do anything about climate change solely because they do not live within the rich countries that have started to regulate climate damaging behaviours (see Harris, 2016). To blame rich countries for climate change is to not blame millions of the richest people on Earth. For example, from a country-focused perspective, a rich German enjoying a ?ight in her private jet is held indirectly responsible for climate change (but only a little bit, because she is still enjoying the ?ight after all) because her behaviour is taxed by her country’s government as part of its efforts to reduce the country’s (and, technically, also the EU’s) GHG emissions. However, an even richer Brazilian enjoying a ?ight in his own private jet bears no responsibility at all, not even indirectly, because his country is not technically ‘rich’. Similarly, a well-off (but not super-rich) resident of rich Sweden will have his behaviour taxed and regulated to push him to reduce his activities that lead to GHG emissions. In contrast, millions of better-off people (vastly more than the entire population of Sweden) in ‘developing’ China are encouraged by their government to consume and travel to fuel economic growth—to do all of the things in fact that people must stop doing if climate change is to be taken seriously. Cosmopolitanism reveals this absurdity by looking past the political importance of national borders to identify where responsibility ought to be attributed. In doing so, it reveals both the ethical and practical importance of making rich people everywhere responsible for climate change. Even if not all climate policy revolves around what is revealed by this alternative approach, much of it ought to be. All rich people, regardless of whether they live in rich countries, ought not wait for their national governments to force them to change their polluting lifestyles. They should reduce their GHG emissions as far as they can, which effectively means trying to eliminate all non-essential polluting activities from their lives. For example, rich people ought proactively to curtail airline travel because such behaviour contributes substantially to climate change and is almost always not necessary, often done only for pleasure. Rich people ought to curtail their consumption of meat because it is a major source of GHG emissions, is not necessary for health and alternative foods are available to almost all rich people. Rich people ought to have fewer children—unless those children will be nurtured to live their lives sustainably. Rich people should also use their capabilities to push for public policies that foster major cuts in GHG emissions. Rich people in democracies ought to support and vote for candidates who advocate aggressive pro-climate policies. Rich people ought to take such actions not because their countries are responsible for climate change, but because they are as well. To emphasise this point, James Garvey asks us to look in the mirror: ‘It is 150 Paul G. Harris and Kenneth Shockley possible to think that my failure to do something about my high-carbon lifestyle really is morally outrageous’ (Garvey, 2008: 142; cf. Harris, 2016: 151–152). What individual persons do, and of course especially what individual rich persons do, matters because each individual’s contribution to climate-changing pollution is added to that of everyone else’s. As Steve Vanderheiden argues, ‘Isolated individual contributions to larger aggregate problems may appear to be trivial, yet the countless occurrences of such seemingly trivial acts together add up to quite serious harms’ (Vanderheiden, 2008: 166). To use the words of Thomas Pogge, which he applies to the problem of global poverty: ‘nearly every privileged person might say that she bears no responsibility at all because she alone is powerless to bring about a reform of the global order’ (Pogge, 2002: 170). Pogge describes this as ‘an implausible line of argument, entailing as it does that each participant in a massacre is innocent, provided any persons killed would have been killed by others, had he abstained’ (Pogge, 2002: 170). Many will argue that individual rich persons actually do not have power to respond to climate change in meaningful ways. Garvey has a response to such thinking: against the claim that individual choices cannot matter much, is that nothing else about you stands a chance of making a moral difference at all. If anything matters, it’s all those little choices … The only chance you have of making a moral difference consists in the individual choices you make. (Garvey, 2008: 150) Put another way, the total impact of a life lived high on the hog compared to one lived simply adds up and, when multiplied by two billion or more other relatively af?uent people in the world, the impact is gargantuan. It is the difference between a liveable planet for all and truly monumental suffering for billions. (Harris, 2016: 192–193) Thinking more about what rich people do, and less about what rich countries do, helps to highlight these realities. Historical responsibility: the practicality of a paradox Looking at responsibility for climate change from a cosmopolitan perspective has other bene?ts. For example, it enables us to do a better job of assessing historical responsibility for climate change. One obstacle to persuading rich countries to take on more responsibility, and to act accordingly, is differing views on which of them are more or less responsible for GHG emissions in the past. By looking at responsibility from a cosmopolitan perspective, one might see that there could be more responsibility among rich people in developing countries than normal country-oriented arguments might reveal. This is because rich people in af?uent countries did not realise that they were causing climate change until the latter years of the last century. When they realised the consequences of what they were doing, they were already deeply immersed in lifestyles that lead to severe climate change. In contrast, rich people in many developing countries who adopted similar lifestyles only recently, including the many millions of new middle-class consumers in those Responsibility for climate change 151 countries, knew from the time that they became ‘rich’ that many of their consumption behaviours were contributing to climate change. They were aware of climate change before getting on the global consumption bandwagon and with that awareness comes responsibility. History may not judge them favourably. (We can debate whether ordinary citizens fully understand their own contribution to climate change, but we ought not overlook wilful ignorance among most rich people.) Considering such a paradoxical conclusion is only possible if we stop focusing so much on rich countries and instead focus more on rich people, including those who do not live in rich countries. For example, the number of Chinese tourists is growing rapidly, helping to make air travel one of the fastest-growing sources of climate-changing emissions. Millions of Chinese citizens now ?y around the world on holidays, contributing greatly to climate change. If we attribute responsibility for climate change to rich countries, all of these holidaymakers bear no responsibility for the contribution that they make to climate change because China (despite its obvious wealth) is still of?cially ‘developing’. Those Chinese tourists can and do make the argument that they have a right to consume in this way because China does not bear responsibility and that it has the right to follow the same development path as that of the world’s rich countries (see Harris, 2011). Debating climate change from a cosmopolitan perspective could lead to better policies for and by countries. In addition to doing what is morally right, assuming more responsibility for climate change by rich people—even those not living in rich countries—could help to nudge rich countries to do more to live up to their responsibilities for climate change. For example, if rich people outside rich countries are not held responsible for climate change, rich people within rich countries—most of which are democracies, where rich people have signi?cant in?uence on policymaking—will do all that they can to discourage their governments from implementing policies that hold the rich suf?ciently responsible. This is more or less what has been happening for decades, with the consequence being very few new policies that result in major cuts in people’s GHG emissions. (Has any rich person in any rich country avoided air travel due to a government policy discouraging such behaviour?) It would be much harder for rich people in rich countries to justify such responses to climate change if rich people all around the world were made proportionately responsible. What is more, if not-so-rich people in rich countries were to see the richest among them ?nally taking responsibility and acting accordingly, widespread political opposition to major action on climate change would be diminished. Conclusion We can argue that rich people have the greatest responsibility for climate change because they cause so much harm and are so capable of stopping that harm. But, in truth, they are not solely responsible. Rich countries, too, are responsible—as are all capable actors, ranging from community groups and businesses to multinational corporations and substate actors, such as Scotland and New York City, as well as international governmental and nongovernmental organisations, such as the European Union and the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA). Collectively, all of them are responsible for climate change (see Chapter 12). Collectively, all actors that are rich have a responsibility to change their ways. However, after three decades of effort, we should stop relying so heavily on countries to do that which they are not well designed to do: to act for the long-term global 152 Paul G. Harris and Kenneth Shockley collective good instead of for their own perceived short-term national interests (which, by the way, are often shaped to protect the interests of their most af?uential citizens). While we ought not ignore the responsibilities of rich countries, we also ought not ignore the responsibilities of rich people. More of the climate change debate should be about them. More policies should be about them. More education should be about their responsibilities—about your responsibilities, and mine. And we should debate the fact that millions of the world’s rich people live in developing countries. Regardless of what those countries are willing and able to do to address climate change, their rich citizens ought not be let off the hook. To do so sends the worst message to rich people in rich countries. Telling the latter to bear fewer children, ?y less, drive less, eat less meat, live in smaller homes, use less energy and consume less, will not be nearly as effective a message if they see rich people in developing countries ?ying more, eating more meat and so on. This goes without saying, but we ought to start saying it much more. Again, rich people matter—everywhere. Acknowledgements The author has made similar arguments in Harris (2013, 2016) and in other publications, which are listed on his website: www.paulgharris.net. NO: Primary responsibility must rest with states and institutional actors (Kenneth Shockley) Introduction: what is moral responsibility? Rich people do not bear the greatest responsibility for climate change. Primary responsibility falls on states, provincial and other regional governments, international corporations, ?nancial institutions, intergovernmental organisations and other actors in the international arena. In what follows I will refer to these entities as institutional actors, in contrast to individual actors. Institutional actors are able to bring about change, are the primary drivers for the climate change that has taken place and are the primary means by which it can be addressed. Whether we think of responsibility as retrospective (the responsibility we hold for what we have done historically) or prospective (the responsibility we hold for what we can do), the responsible party must be a causally effective agent. And in the international arena where responsibility for climate change can be meaningfully addressed, individuals are simply not effective agents. The argument is straightforward: if something is not an effective agent, then it cannot be morally responsible. First, rich people, collectively, do not constitute an agent, and so do not constitute an effective agent. Second, a rich person as an individual does not have suf?cient causal control over climate change and so does not constitute an effective agent, at least in relation to climate change. As moral responsibility requires some degree of causal control on the part of a responsible agent, rich people are not morally responsible for climate change … at least not directly. We should be clear on what is necessary to be held responsible.1 Whether a matter of being held responsible for what we have done in the past or what we are required to do going forward, moral responsibility requires both causal connection and blameworthiness. The ?rst element, causal connection, is the requirement that to be retrospectively responsible for something one must have done it, and to be prospectively responsible for something one Responsibility for climate change 153 must be able to do it. On most accounts of responsibility there must be some causal connection between an agent’s performance of an action and any responsibility attributed to that agent for the action or state of affairs that results from that action. For example, suppose an anvil falls off a building and hits Abbas on the head. If Beta neither caused the anvil to fall (say, by pushing it), nor could have prevented the anvil from falling (say, because she lacked the strength), it would be odd to say that Beta is either retrospectively or prospectively morally responsible for what happened to Abbas. Moral responsibility requires a degree of causal control suf?cient to make an individual an effective agent. Unless an individual is causally effective, they cannot be morally responsible. The second element, blameworthiness, amounts to the claim that there was something culpable about what was done (e.g. it was done recklessly) or the way it was done (e.g. it was done with malicious intent), or what should be done (as a duty of one’s social station or as compensation for a historical bene?t or historical transgression). But note, there is an important asymmetry between causal control and blameworthiness. In order to be blameworthy for an action or outcome one must have some causal connection to the action or outcome. It isn’t appropriate to blame someone for an action, to hold them responsible for it, when they neither performed that action (they didn’t do it) nor could have prevented it. Causation is required before we can consider blame. For example, even if someone steps on my toe (and so has the requisite causal connection), they are only blameworthy for stepping on my toe if they did it intentionally, or if it occurred because they were negligent and failed to exercise due care, or could and should have taken measures to avoid stepping on my toe. The acid test for blameworthiness is whether or not the relevant party had mens rea, a guilty mind. We will return to blameworthiness in the discussion below but, here, we should see the central importance of causal control for responsibility. Rich people, responsibility and e?ective agency While in aggregate rich people have had a disproportionate in?uence on the climate, they are individually not effective agents and, in aggregate, not agents at all. First, once we are clear about the signi?cance of causal control for matters of moral responsibility, it should be equally clear that individual agents are not individually responsible for climate change (SinnottArmstrong, 2005). It is certainly the case that a very small percentage of the world’s population engage in activities that produce a disproportionate share of emissions (Shue, 1993). With very few exceptions, however, only states and other international actors have the requisite causal control over emissions and so only states and other international actors are, therefore, responsible. Particular rich individuals are generally not effective agents of change either for addressing future challenges generated by climate change or for taking historical responsibility for climate change. Moreover, exceptions help make the case. Some very few wealthy or politically powerful individuals do have what we might think of as international agency, including the Pope, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and others. But they usually have this agency only through institutional actors (the Church, international corporations and so on). This connection between individuals and institutions will be important in what follows. Second, rich people are not collectively responsible for climate change as they are not the sort of group that is or could be a collective agent. We should be clear on what would be required for ‘rich people’ to be an agent. Following List and Pettit (2011: 158), a group is morally responsible if they are able, as a group, (1) to face a ‘normatively signi?cant choice’ that involves performing an action that is right or wrong, or good or bad, (2) to understand that choice in such a way that they can evaluate options and make a ‘normative 154 Paul G. Harris and Kenneth Shockley judgement about the options,’ and (3) to have ‘the control required for choosing between the options’. The key point is that for the group to be held responsible it will have to have the capacity for deliberation and control necessary for any agent. Rich people, taken as a single group, are simply not the right sort of entity. All rich individuals, taken together, do not share the deliberative or decision-making processes or institutions necessary for attributing agency. There is no collective understanding, evaluation, judgement or control. There is no capacity for collective choice. Therefore, as a group, rich people do not constitute an agent of the relevant sort to hold either backward directed responsibility for historical harms or forward directed responsibility for making the necessary changes. But this doesn’t get rich people off the hook (see Moellendorf, 2014). Individuals, particularly rich individuals, are not morally free to do whatever they like, thereby of?oading moral responsibility to institutional actors. They have responsibilities, but those responsibilities are ?ltered, indirectly, through states and other institutional actors. States and institutions are the appropriate focus for responsibility In contrast with rich individuals, institutional actors are effective agents in the international arena (see List and Pettit, 2011, for an argument that institutional entities may constitute agents). States are able to affect domestic policy by, for example, addressing consumption patterns and enabling individual actors to have effective choices involving greenhouse gas emissions. They are able to affect the international political context in a way conducive to addressing climate change. Other non-state institutional actors— banks, international political entities, provincial and other regional governments—also have the capacity to make similar changes in both the domestic and international political landscape (see Chapter 12). Decisions made by banks to support renewable energy resources, long-term infrastructure decisions made by local and regional governments and regional carbon trading markets (see Chapter 6), for example, all have the capacity to make substantial changes to emissions patterns. Decisions by particular rich individuals usually have little or no effect on such patterns, except insofar as they leverage institutions. Not only are institutional actors (and remember, institutional actors include much more than traditional nation states) the relevant actors for addressing global environmental problems such as climate change, they are also the only means by which any particular individual could have any relevant effect in the international political realm. Institutional actors are the mediators between individual choice and global change. And they are political actors. They can make a difference in how we address climate change; they can change the political landscape, both domestic and international, in which serious efforts to address climate change take place. Moreover, they are the entities that have failed to make the necessary changes, historically, that have put us in the place we are in. Primary responsibility for climate change rests with institutional actors. They hold and have held the levers to make the needed changes. There is this important complication. As the concern is often about the moral responsibility associated with climate change, individuals might yet play a particularly signi?cant role. We have seen that moral responsibility requires that the responsible entity have something akin to a guilty mind. This is challenging to see in the case of states and other institutional actors (although, again, see List and Pettit, 2011). Further, while it is unclear how rich people, taken as a group, could possibly have a guilty mind, it is quite clear that individual persons, rich or not, are more than capable of having a guilty mind. Responsibility for climate change 155 Individuals are the ultimate example of moral agents. However, as we have noted, individuals are not causally connected to climate change in the right way and so do not bear (individual) moral responsibility for climate change (Jamieson, 1992). But individuals might well bear moral responsibility for failing to contribute to institutions in the right way (Gardiner, 2017; Shockley, 2016). For that is a matter over which they do have some control and a matter which may well have great moral signi?cance. What role should be played by the rich, or by individuals more generally? Individuals do have a role to play, one that comes with substantial moral responsibility. In particular, rich individuals have bene?tted the most from our unsustainable economic system, have had a disproportionate in?uence on the institutions that can have an effect on climate change and there are some who have a large amount of political in?uence. Rich individuals are therefore responsible for contributing to changes in institutional actors such that those institutional actors are better able to address climate change. With the great power that (rightly or wrongly) comes from bene?tting from the economic systems that generate climate change comes great responsibility. The industrial processes and economic growth that have fuelled climate change have made the rich rich. And so one might think there is a prima facie responsibility for providing some sort of compensation for the climate change associated with this wealth. However, focusing on this wealth may well lead us to miss the underlying cause—the institutional arrangements and economic and political systems—that enabled the development of individual wealth in the ?rst place. If there is a responsibility on wealthy individuals for changing these arrangements and systems, then the greater the ability to make such changes, the greater the responsibility for doing so. The historical acquisition of power by rich individuals generates a responsibility to rectify wrongs—by changing the system that led to those wrongs. It also places a responsibility on them for making the forward directed changes that address the problems that will arise from climate change and to make the institutional changes necessary to minimise the generation of further harm. Because wealth provides the means to make the institutional changes that can have an effect on climate change, wealthy individuals have a responsibility to do so. Yet one might worry that individuals will not live up to their responsibilities and make the necessary changes in their political and institutional environment. Getting individuals to live up to their responsibilities is clearly a problem, but it is a familiar one. The alternative, requiring individuals to satisfy direct cosmopolitan responsibilities for climate change—as argued here by Paul Harris—would seem to face a substantially worse version of this challenge. As Jamieson (1992) and Sinnott-Armstrong (2005) both make clear, it is very hard to operationalise, or even to make sense of, an individual responsibility for climate change, particularly a moral responsibility. In such contexts it is very dif?cult to see how any individual could be both blameworthy and causally connected to any relevant harm. Individuals may have dif?culties living up to their well-established responsibilities. But it is much harder to see how individuals would live up to new and unfamiliar responsibilities they can’t even understand. There is more hope in getting individuals to live up to their responsibilities through a contributory approach. So, while the possession of economic and political power by rich people does bring with it some responsibility to drive institutional actors to change their behaviour, that responsibility is not for climate change directly. At least in most instances, individual responsibility is for making the changes (and having failed to make the changes in the 156 Paul G. Harris and Kenneth Shockley past) to our political systems and the related economic and social institutions. We might well think of this form of individual moral responsibility as contributory responsibility. We will see below that this is important if we are to assess responsibility properly and bring about effective change: both institutions and individuals have roles to play. Conclusion There is a practical tension underlying the question of who bears primary responsibility for climate change. If primary responsibility is focused on rich individuals, we risk letting states off the hook. If states are not responsible, and rich individuals are, then there is no point in pressing states to address climate change. This echoes a common concern with the renewed focus on non-state actors in the climate change policy process (see Chapter 12)—provincial and regional governments, banks, nongovernmental organisations, research entities and so on. Some worry that states might reason that if these actors can play a larger role, then perhaps states can take a smaller role. They might thereby avoid having to address any historical responsibility or duties due to their citizens or to those affected by their historical actions. On the other hand, if primary responsibility is focused on states, we risk letting individuals, especially rich individuals, off the hook from making any individual changes. Individuals, it might be thought, can do whatever they want and pass the buck on to the institutions and governments that hold responsibility. Of course, given the history of state inaction with regard to climate change, cynicism about states’ ability to address climate change is understandable. Harris (2008: 482) writes, ‘the climate change regime has failed. The arguments for international—that is, interstate—justice that have permeated the climate change regime have been insuf?cient’. His thought is that while we should still rely on states, we need to rely on individuals as well. To be sure, policy institutions (normally states) ought to play a big part by mediating the obligations of individual persons. However, institutions have failed so far; climate change is accelerating. We ought not reject the argument, made by some cosmopolitans, that people ought to push for the creation of the institutions that can mediate our obligations (Moellendorf, 2002). But we must be realistic in admitting the dif?culty of doing this: we have not succeeded in doing it so far, we cannot wait forever, and huge numbers of people live in authoritarian environments where they have little ability to shape institutions, although they do often have the ability to shape their own behaviour. (Harris, 2008: 490) Yet to think that individuals, acting through their reduced consumption, can affect change in the climate is at least as problematic as thinking states will solve all our climate problems for us. What I propose here is a middle ground: states and institutions bear primary responsibility, but individuals bear a contributory responsibility, a responsibility to ensure that those states and institutional actors are doing the job they are morally required to do (Shockley, 2016). One of the great challenges of climate change is the dangerous decoupling of moral and causal responsibility, of both forward and backward directed varieties. Focusing on either individual responsibility, in order to capture the distinctively moral features of Responsibility for climate change 157 responsibility, or institutional responsibility, in order to capture the need for ef?cacious responsibilities, misses something. Contributory responsibility carries a distinctively moral connection between individual responsibility and the institutions that are effective climate actors in the international arena. It therefore provides a means of binding individuals to the moral harms of climate change, without requiring institutional actors to have moral responsibilities they cannot have or requiring individuals to do more than they are able. While the rich do not hold primary responsibility for climate change, we all have a responsibility to create and change the institutional actors that are the effective, responsible parties in our global response to climate change. To the extent that the rich are more able to bring about change in those institutions, they have a greater responsibility to do so. Individuals have a better chance of leveraging institutions—states, ?nancial institutions, NGOs—to thereby make the changes necessary to lead to less climate-intensive consumption. This is the contrast: no one should doubt that individuals have moral responsibilities resulting from the grossly problematic actions of states. The question is what they have responsibilities for. As individuals are ineffective actors in the international arena where climate change can be affected, they cannot be responsible for making those changes. Ought implies can, after all. But coordinated individuals, individuals in concert, organised by institutions and governments that they themselves reform or develop, are able to make the changes necessary to reduce emissions. And, if they are successful, to also reform the institutions and social arrangements that make climate change so deeply problematic. If we want to address the cause of climate change we should look not to individuals, whether rich or not. Rather, we should look to the states and other institutions that are both the effective actors and mediators of individual actions. Primary responsibility for addressing climate change rests with those entities, even if it is the moral responsibility of individuals to change those entities so that they better address the greatest moral challenge of our day. Further reading Broome, J. (2012) Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming World. New York: WW Norton & Company. In this book, Broome considers the moral dimensions of climate change, reasoning through what universal standards of goodness and justice require of us, both as citizens and as governments. His conclusions both challenge and enlighten. Eco-conscious readers hear they have a duty to offset all their carbon emissions, while policymakers are called upon to grapple with what, if anything, is owed to future generations. Gardiner, S.M. and Weisbach, D.A. (2016) Debating Climate Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. This book presents arguments for and against the relevance of ethics to global climate policy. Gardiner argues that climate change is fundamentally an ethical issue, since it is an early instance of a distinctive challenge to ethical action. Ethical concerns are at the heart of many of the decisions that need to be made. By contrast, Weisbach argues that existing ethical theories are not well suited to addressing climate change. Harris, P.G. (2016) Global Ethics and Climate Change. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. This book combines the science of climate change with ethical critique. Harris exposes the increasing intensity of dangerous trends—particularly growing global af?uence, material consumption and pollution—and the intensifying moral dimensions of changes to the environment. A free learning guide 158 Paul G. Harris and Kenneth Shockley is available at: www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/media/resources/Global_Ethics_and_Climate_ Change_2nd_Edition_-_Learning_Guide.pdf Hayward, T. (2012) Climate change and ethics. Nature Climate Change. 2(12): 843–848. Hayward shows how the greater part of debate about the ethics of climate change focuses on questions about who has what responsibility to bear the burdens of mitigating it or adapting to it. The connections between human rights and climate change are examined, as too are questions concerning justice in the present, our responsibilities to the future and the relation between individual and collective responsibilities. Peeters, W., Smet, A.D., Diependaele, L., Sterckx, S., McNeal, R.H. and De Smet, A. (2015) Climate Change and Individual Responsibility: Agency, Moral Disengagement and the Motivational Gap. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. This book discusses the agency and responsibility of individuals for climate change. It argues that these responsibilities are underemphasised, enabling individuals to maintain their consumptive lifestyles without having to accept moral responsibility for their luxury emissions. Follow-up questions for use in student classes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. If rich countries fail to act on their responsibilities for climate change, which actors should do so instead? Why and how should those actors do it and why have they not done so already? Would the responsibility of rich countries for climate change be different if all of their rich citizens moved to developing countries and took up citizenship there? What level of wealth constitutes being rich enough to have a responsibility for changing political institutions capable of addressing climate change? How effective are rich persons as agents of change? What is your responsibility for causing climate change? What is your responsibility for trying to stop it? Note 1 See also Moellendorf (2014: 152–180) for an excellent treatment of responsibility in the context of climate change. References Caney, S. (2005) Cosmopolitan justice, responsibility, and climate change. Leiden Journal of International Law. 18: 747–775. 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