Individual Responsibility for Climate Change

1 Individual Responsibility for Climate Change Gianfranco Pellegrino Luiss Guido Carli (Very early draft. Do not quote) 1. Preliminary remarks Are we individually responsible of global anthropogenic climate change? Do we have individual duties to act in order to mitigate the dangerous effects of climate change? Both in scientific and philosophical debates, conventional wisdom answers in the negative. The majority of authors writing on this topic seem to agree upon the idea that obligations to mitigate present and future climate changes concern governments and collective groups, not individuals, because there is no direct responsibility of individuals in intending and causing climate change. As individuals, we have the duty to prompt our governments to act against climate change, but we have no obligation to substitute governmental action with ours.1 The clearest recent statement of this view has been given by Walter SinnottArmstrong: 'Global warming and climate change occur on such a massive scale that my individual [action] makes no difference to the welfare of anyone.'2 A more moderate position is put forward by Dale Jamieson, who claims that we have various kinds of responsibility for future climate changes, but our responsibility is of a new kind, different from traditional sorts of moral and political responsibility.3 In this paper, I'll do two things. First, I'll provide a detailed analysis of the kind of causality involved in anthropogenic climate change and of the role this sort of causation has in views denying individual moral responsibility for future climate alterations (§ 3). Second, I'll challenge the standard story, by claiming that individuals have full responsibility for climate change, and that the common-sense conception of moral responsibility can be extended to increasing-temperatures conducts (§ 4). This claim will rely on a thicker or more moralized conception of responsibility. As I shall claim in § 1, The main motivations behind this attempt are the following ones. First, obscure view of causality and wrong view of responsibility moral shortcomings of collective responsibility – non-democratic, …. Three preliminary caveats might be helpful. 1. Absence of individual responsibility for climate changes is often cited as a ground to explain the motivational difficulty of the morality of climate change. Here is a statement of this view: 'Because we tend not to see climate change as a moral problem, it does not motivate us to act with the urgency characteristic of our responses to moral challenges.'4 The kind of conduct needed to abate emissions and to mitigate future climate changes runs contrary to entrenched human motivations. The austere, self-denying and extremely cautious management of resources and lifestyles needed to abate current GHG emissions is easily perceived as strikingly severe and over-demanding. A common explanation of this perception appeals to the distance in time and space of the effects of our current consumption. We fail to fully appreciate the scope and the remote consequences of our behaviour. This 1 2 3 4 See Vanderheiden 2008: 160-1, 167-80. Sinnott-Armstrong 2010: 337; see also ibid.: 339. See Jamieson 2009, §§ 2-5. Jamieson 2007: 477. G. Pellegrino – Individual Responsibility for Climate Change 2 failure may cause our resistance to substantial changes of our habits and explain our impervious reactions to any appeal to the moral salience of what we produce through our consumption styles. A ground of this lukewarm moral reaction to the alleged harm we are causing to distant and future people may be the fact that we are not able to see that we are causing those harms in a direct way through our individual action. The claim that climate change is not a matter of individual responsibility may explain motivational resistance to appeals to direct action in this field. Here, I won't deny this explanation. I won't deny the fact that climate change may appear as somewhat disconnected from individual action. Rather, I am going to deny that climate change is truly disconnected from individual agency. The common sense perception of our not being responsible of long-distance effects may well be the right explanation of the widespread motivational resistance to the demands of the morality of climate change. However, this perception is mistaken, and current motivations running contrary to the morality of climate change should be revised. 2. The concern for individual responsibility underlying this paper gets its point from a specific conception of what grounds our obligations. I am here assuming that we have obligations to act only if, and in so far as, our action makes some difference to the state of the world. In this kind of views, any action having no influence at all in producing or preventing some state of affairs is morally indifferent. Differently put, only the moral quality of states of affairs knowingly and reliably produced through action provides a standard of judgement for human conduct. But bringing about a state of affairs in a knowing and reliable way through one's own action means being responsible of it. Accordingly, responsibility is a necessary condition for moral judgment and for the very existence of obligations. This view is usually connected to consequentialist approaches, even though it is obviously not all of the story about consequentialism.5 (Here, I'll not consider whether there are kinds of consequentialism not endorsing this view, nor whether non-consequentialist approaches might endorse it.) Applied to the morality of climate change, this view implies that only if individuals are responsible of it, they can be demanded to do something in order to prevent future climate alterations. Consequently, claiming that global climate change is not a matter of individual responsibility would amount to declare impossible a consequentialist morality of climate change. This result might be regarded as not very significant. After all, if a consequentialist approach to the morality of climate change turns out to be conceptually impossible, so much the worse for consequentialists. However, this is a hasty conclusion. Any conceptual assumption that narrows down the realm of ethical options that can be employed to deal with a specific issue is a suspicious starting point. The best way to conceptualize an issue in moral philosophy is one that allows every substantive stance. Arguments against a given approach should concern the content of the theory considered, not its conceptual assumptions. Assumptions able to exclude from the outset a given substantive solution should be avoided. Assuming that climate change does never involve individual responsibilities rules out consequentialism from the realm of the options that can be employed in the morality of climate change. This consequence of the assumption may well provide an argument against it, in the light of the considerations contained in the 5 See G. Pellegrino – Individual Responsibility for Climate Change 3 previous paragraph. However, here I'll not pursue this line of argument. I'll rather start from the idea that the issue of our individual responsibility for climate change needs further examination. But I cannot deny that the source of my concerns in this paper lies in my preference for a consequentialist approach to the morality of climate change. 3. This paper might be read as running contrary to the idea that abatement of emissions is a collective action and a matter of collective responsibility. This would be a wrong reading. What I contend here is that our responsibility for mitigating climate change is not only collective, but also individual – or better, it is collective because it is individual. To put it differently, the main idea of this paper is that, due to certain features of the causal chains involved in climate change and of the actions needed to abate emissions, our collective responsibility for mitigating climate change distributes onto individual responsibility. How and why this is the case it should be clearer in the following sections. However, it should be clear from the outset that my target here is not any claim to the effect that we have collective responsibilities, as members of relevant groups, for the abatement of emissions creating climate change. Rather, the focus of the argument here is a much limited and precise view, to the effect that responsibility for coping with climate change belongs only to collectives, and never to individuals. 2. Moral responsibility for climate change: the standard story The claim that we have no individual responsibility for climate change is usually grounded on the following remarks. In many accounts,6 moral responsibility ascriptions depend on the following three conditions: a. intentionality: the outcome produced is intended – i.e. wished, wanted, or desired – by the agent; b. causality: the agent's action makes a difference7 for the outcome produced; c. control: ceteris paribus, the agent is able to control the outcomes of her action, i.e. she is able to prevent their occurrence.8 The dynamics of anthropogenic climate change is such that no single action can make a difference in current climatic trends, even though climate change is the product of several individual actions. Moreover, occurrence of climate change cannot be prevented by the effort of individuals. Individual acts can at most contribute to climate change, they can be parts of complex causal chains producing dangerous warming, but no individual action can make a real difference in the 6 7 8 See, for instance, “Making a difference” may be understood in various ways, along a scale of different strength. It might be argued that causes are necessary and sufficient conditions of their effects; but this view has been criticized widely (see ). To my purpose here, it is enough to assume that causes make some difference to their effects, even though they are not necessary and sufficient conditions, or even though they are simply concurrent, or merely enabling, conditions, and so on. One may wonder why here a negative wording is adopted. Why not saying that an agent is able to control the outcomes of her action when she is able to make this outcome occurring? There are many reasons against a positive statement of the control condition. The main reason is that effects do not issue exclusively out of singular causes, but rather need background conditions. Striking a match causes fire, but only where oxygen is present. One can be able to control the occurrence of fire, in the sense that one is able to light a match. However, one is obviously unable to control any of the background conditions needed to the occurrence of fire. Accordingly, it is better to say that, ceteris paribus, one is able to prevent the occurrence of fire, by not lighting a match. G. Pellegrino – Individual Responsibility for Climate Change 4 occurring of climate changes. Individual omissions – for instance individual reductions of consumption or emissions – can at most contribute to preventing climate change, but they are not able, at least in isolation, to bring about alterations in current trends of warming. Moreover, nobody intended to produce climate change, even when doing actions that if joined with many other similar acts, were able to increase GHG emissions.9 Accordingly, so far as climate change is involved, the three conditions of moral responsibility's ascriptions do not hold, and there is no single individual who can be deemed responsible for it. Climate change is not an issue of individual moral responsibility. Possibly, it can a be matter of collective moral responsibility.10 However, in so far as collective responsibility implies a collective duty to abate emissions and mitigate global climate change, this collective duty does not not create parallel individual obligations, because no individual responsibility is at stake. As Walter Sinnott-Armstrong clearly stated, 'global warming is such a large problem that it is not individuals who cause it or who need to fix it. Instead, governments need to fix it, and quickly. Finding and implementing a real solution is the task of governments'.11 3. Causing climate change: two different views It seems that climate change does not involve the usual kind of direct, linear causation. This is the kind of causation that works as a condition of moral responsibility in situations where determinable individuals produce specific harms to identifiable individuals or groups. As Dale Jamieson reminds us, 'climate change is not a matter of a clearly identifiable individual acting intentionally so as to inflict an identifiable harm to another identifiable individual, closely related in time and space.'12 However, it is not the case that climate change involves no human causation at all. After all, if climatic trends were completely independent of human action, if they were not caused by human behaviour, it would be improper to talk about anthropogenic climate change, as well as it would be nonsensical to demand reducing emissions as a strategy to prevent, or to mitigate, future climate alterations.13 It seems that some kind, or some amount, of human causation is to be involved in climate change. Then, the question is: what kind of causality is specific of climate change, and why this kind of causality is not sufficient to trigger moral responsibility? Human actions producing climate changes are not instances of causal overdetermination. It is not the case that in bringing about future alterations in the climate we are acting like when one 'is poisoning someone who is already dying from poison.'14. We are not performing an act able to cause the effect, with an intention to do it, after another person did the same kind of action – the latter being 9 10 11 12 13 14 See Vanderheiden 2008: 160, 183-4, 208-10. See Vanderheiden 2008: 167. Sinnott-Armstrong 2010: 343-44. Jamieson 2007: 476-77; see also Jamieson 2009, § 4. Climate change is defined an anthropogenic, i.e. human-induced, phenomenon in . Indeed, the main target of the policy recommendations voiced in the documents just cited is that dangerous amount of climate change mainly due to human activities after the first industrial revolution. There is no hint in these documents that other natural phenomena of climate variations, even dangerous, should be a target of policy recommendations. Sinnott-Armstrong 2010: 336. See also Parfit 1984: 70. G. Pellegrino – Individual Responsibility for Climate Change 5 the real cause of the effect. Our individual actions are not causes of climate change in this direct way, nor is the case that our action has imperceptible effects on future climate.15 If so, there would be no puzzles about individual responsibility for climate change, because people should be deemed responsible of acts with imperceptible, but dangerous, effects.16 The problem does not lie even in the fact that our climate-determining actions may have delayed effects in the distant future. The puzzle is rather that the kind of causation involved in anthropogenic climate changes is indirect, or non-linear, in a sense to be further specified. As SinnottArmstrong points out, [...] my individual [action] does not cause global warming, climate change, or any of their resulting harms, at least directly. Contrast someone who pours cyanide poison into a river. Later someone drinking from the river downstream ingests some molecules of the poison. Those molecules cause the person to get ill and die. This is very different from the causal chain in global warming, because no particular molecules from my car cause global warming in the direct way that particular molecules of the poison do cause the drinker’s death. Global warming is more like a river that is going to flood downstream because of torrential rains. I pour a quart of water into the river upstream (maybe just because I do not want to carry it). My act of pouring the quart into the river is not a cause of the flood. Analogously, my act of driving for fun is not a cause of global warming.17 However, this way of speaking is highly metaphoric. What's the concrete meaning of 'indirect', here? In which sense human actions causing climate change do not work as direct causes? The idea might be that there are epistemic difficulties in mapping individual actions onto the final outcomes. We might be facing nontraceable causation, i.e. the impossibility to trace effects back to their original causes. As Sinnott-Armstrong claims, 'no storms or floods or droughts or heat waves can be traced to my individual act of driving.'18 If this is the case, the conclusion that nobody is individually responsible follows. One cannot be fully responsible of a given outcome if one cannot know how her action produced those effects. But it can be asked why the causal chains involved in climate change production are so weird. Why – when climate change is concerned – single human actions do not linearly contribute to the final outcomes, nor are they mappable onto the final effects? Answers to this question might help to figure out the real features of human causation of climate change. One answer might be that individual human actions are non-exclusive or insufficient causes of climate change, i.e. they are neither necessary nor sufficient causes of global warming.19 This feature of certain individual human actions – i.e. their insufficient causal impact – might explain the epistemic difficulty we experience in tracing final effects on climate back to their human causes. Not being a necessary and sufficient cause, no one can be sure of whether and when one's own action will act as a driver of climate change. As a consequence, there is no way to decompose and trace back the cumulative impact of individual actions on final results. In its turn, this epistemic difficulty explains why we have no individual responsibility for climate change. We are not able to determine the causal impact of our individual deeds on future climate changes. If so, we are not able to control the 15 16 17 18 19 This view is put forward by Vanderheiden 2008: 161-2. Recently, John Nolt See Parfit 1984: Sinnott-Armstrong 2010: 334-5. Sinnott-Armstrong 2010: 336. See Sinnott-Armstrong 2010: 334, 336. G. Pellegrino – Individual Responsibility for Climate Change 6 outcome of our actions, because abstaining from doing certain actions is not a way to prevent climate changes from occurring. Accordingly, the third condition of moral responsibility – the control condition – does not hold. This view of non-traceable causation as non-exclusive or insufficient causality faces two objections, though. First, this view explains away both individual and collective responsibility. For if no single human action is able to determine climate changes, one does not see how an assemblage of human actions can do so. However, climate change is caused by many human actions of the relevant kind, and for this reason it is classified as an anthropogenic phenomenon. This is the reason for which we are collectively responsible for it, even though no one is individually responsible. Understood as insufficient causality, non-traceable causation explains absence of individual responsibility, but at the cost of jeopardizing collective responsibility and denying the truth about anthropogenic drivers of climate change. Second, the grounds of any appeal to action against climate change lies in the fact that even though no individual effort can do anything to prevent future climate alterations, coordinated human action – i.e. an assemblage of human acts going in the same direction – can mitigate, if not stop, the current trends toward warmer temperatures. Now, any view of human causation of climate change should explain this seemingly contradictory pair: individual action can nothing, but collective action can much. Parallel to this is the common view of our duties in the morality of climate change. Individuals have no duty and responsibility, but collective groups do. As Steve Vanderheiden put it, in climate change ethics there exists a kind of paradox of small effects: It appears to be true of no one that their acts by themselves cause any palpable harm to anyone, and yet the combined like acts of many cause significant harm. In view of consequences, it seems paradoxically to be the case that a morally significant harm has resulted from a series of morally insignificant acts; some bad outcomes appear to have been caused by entirely blameless acts.20 The assumption that single human actions are insufficient causes fails to explain these views. If no single human action is able to cause climate change, how is it possible that an assemblage of human actions works as a powerful driver of climate alterations? A theory of climate change as an anthropogenic phenomenon can't fail to explain this. Maybe a different view can do the explanation. Climate change occurs when a given amount of actions of a certain kind takes place. It is when certain levels of the concentrations of GHG are reached and certain complex reactions of the climate system obtain that durable, and sometimes irreversible, effects on climate take place. Accordingly, it is when a sufficient number of relevant actions of the same kind have been accumulated that effects on the climate follow. As a consequence, it seems that individual actions cause climate changes in conjunction with others, and beyond a given threshold. This does not deny the claim that single actions are insufficient causes, but rather explain why this is the case. They are insufficient in isolation, and needs to participate in wider groups of similar actions to cause necessarily. Climate change causation, then, might be labeled as a threshold causation.21 In this picture, no one is able to know whether the relevant threshold will be trespassed. This holds both for actions leading to climate change and for actions aimed at preventing future climate alterations. Moreover, the origin of this 20 21 Venderheiden 2008: 160. See Vanderheiden 2008: 163-5. G. Pellegrino – Individual Responsibility for Climate Change 7 uncertainty lies not so much in scientific uncertainties concerning the climate system, but rather in strategic uncertainties connected with coordinated action. Any of us is unable to know how other people will act – and how other people act may make one's action either decisive or completely unhelpful. If I reduce my emissions-producing activities when no one is doing the same, or even when no sufficient number of people are doing the same, then my action is obviously causally inefficient. Had a sufficient number of people abstained from certain kinds of fossil fuels consumption in the past, climate change would have been smaller. Since no one can know whether and when her action will be decisive or ineffectual, there is no principled way to trace overall effects back to their individual causes. Threshold causation explains non-traceable causation, and – as previously noticed – non-traceable causation is a ground for denying that individuals have responsibility for climate changes. 4. The strategic harm principle and individual responsibility for climate change A natural way to argue in favour of individual duties to mitigate future climate changes would be by appealing to some version of the harm principle. If our individual actions contribute to produce climate change, and this change in its turn damages future generations, then we are individually responsible for those harms. However, this argument might be rejected on the basis of the remarks presented in the previous section. Our individual actions cause climate changes in a very indirect way, we have seen. In particular, we are not able to find out when and whether our individual action will be causally decisive to a given future climate change, because to be such it needs to be accompanied by a sufficient number of relevantly similar actions. We are not able to forecast whether other people will act so as to make our action causally decisive. Accordingly, we have no control of our allegedly harming action. Therefore, we have no individual responsibility for it, and the harm principle does not hold in those cases.22 Nevertheless, the analysis of non-traceable causation provided above might suggest a different view. Our individual actions are not simply causally ineffectual. Rather, they are threshold-effectual, i.e. they can be causally decisive when a given threshold of relevantly similar actions are also performed. Individuals cannot forecast whether the threshold of similar actions will be trespassed; hence, they are not able to control the outcomes of their action. However, it is not said that this rules out individual responsibility. Moral responsibility ascriptions depend on normative principles dictating or forbidding actions. In particular, it seems that moral considerations about badness or goodness of motives, or compliance with previous commitments, influence our judgments on causality and on the other conditions of moral responsibility. As Hart and Honoré claimed, 'the case of a house-holder whose prudential storing of firewood in the cellar gave a pyromaniac his opportunity to burn it down would be distinguished from that of the careless friend who left the house unlocked: the fire would not be naturally described as a consequence of the storing of the wood though the loss of the spoons was a consequence of leaving the house unlocked.'23 Hart and Honoré's claim has been confirmed by recent inquiries into folk psychology. M.D. Alicke and J. Knobe, for instance, show that our reactions of blame and praise, and our ascriptions of moral responsibility, are driven by previous moral appraisals.24 Knobe stated this claim in a very straightforward way: 22 23 24 See Sinnott-Armstrong 2010: 336. Hart and Honoré 1959: 56. See Alicke 1992 and 2000. G. Pellegrino – Individual Responsibility for Climate Change 8 'causal attributions are not purely descriptive judgments. Rather, people's willingness to say that a given behaviour caused a given outcome depends in part on whether they regard the behaviour as morally wrong.'25 To put it otherwise, causal responsibility is not a merely descriptive matter, but it is driven by normative or practical considerations.26 Knobe provided empirical confirmation for Hart and Honoré-like sort of examples, by considering cases where someone fails to live up to a responsibility and thus creates an opportunity for something bad to happen. His empirical findings confirm that causal relations are considered salient not in themselves, but in virtue of previous normative considerations. As J. Driver explains, 'when […] one's friend fails to lock the door behind him, which he ought to have done, then we attribute, at least in part, the cause of the burglary to him, since the normative consideration of his moral failing has more salience than other causal factors.'27 It is my contention that if applied to threshold causation of climate changes, the normative principles regulating the cases above, and like situations, would support the claim that people are individually responsible of their actions, even when those actions will be causally effectual only beyond a given threshold of similar acts. Consider for instance car insurance. In many legal systems, drivers are obliged to pay for an insurance, and this insurance covers the use of the car – i.e. it covers also cases in which the owner is not the driver.28 Moreover, in many legal regimes, liability for damages extends even to stolen cars, at least when the owner made the theft easier by being negligent – for instance, by leaving in the ignition keys.29 Here, a big issue concerns negligence, that works as a substantial assumption underlying the moral appraisals of car insurance situations and the other cases described above. However, those cases display many similarities with threshold causation. That a stolen car damages third parties is obviously an effect not produced by the owner, nor intended by her. Moreover, simply leaving the ignition keys in one's own car does not necessarily cause either theft or harms. It might be argued that the control condition is holding, because by closing the car, and taking the ignition keys, one can prevent robberies. Still, this is obviously false. Ascription of moral responsibility, here, depends entirely on what is regarded as due care, or undue negligence. Closing the car and taking the ignition keys are considered actions imposed by an ideal of due care. Hence, they are considered excuses to liability when one's stolen car damages third parties. In this kind of situations, the following principle seems to be holding: Strategic harm principle: If (1) substantial harms depend on the combination of my action with others' actions, (2) my act only is not sufficient either to bring about those harms or to prevent them, and (3) I don't know whether my fellow-beings will bring about the actions needed to harm, then I am obliged to abstain from my action, at least when this is a display of due care. The strategic harm principle is a kind of intermediate standard, aimed at applying the harm principle in certain specific situations. Applied to climate change and to threshold causation, it dictates that individuals ought to abstain from actions that can produce future climate changes, if enough similar actions will be 25 26 27 28 29 Knobe 2005: 2. See Jamieson 2009, § 2, Vanderheiden 2008: 143-4, 149, Feinberg 1970. Driver 2008: 429. See See, for instance, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1034997/Police-charge-man1-000-car-crash-damage-caused-thief-stolen-VW-Golf.html. G. Pellegrino – Individual Responsibility for Climate Change 9 done. However, it might be objected that what is perceived as due care in ordinary situations cannot be extended to the range of actions that could produce climate changes when added to other similar actions. In particular, it might be claimed that dictating abstention from actions such as driving, having long showers, eating food produced abroad would amount to forbid conducts that are too common and widespread to be a suitable object of prohibitions. Issuing such prohibitions is either too demanding or counter-productive. The latter concern is voiced by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong: Labeling an act a cause of harm and, on this basis, holding its agent responsible for that harm by blaming the agent or condemning his act is normally counterproductive when that agent is acting no worse than most other people. If people who are doing no worse than average are condemned, then people who are doing much worse than average will suspect that they will still be subject to condemnation even if they start doing better, and even if they improve enough to bring themselves up to the average. We should distribute blame (and praise) so as to give incentives for the worst offenders to get better. The most efficient and effective way to do this is to reserve our condemnation for those who are well below average. This means that we should not hold people responsible for harms by calling their acts causes of harms when their acts are not at all unusual, assuming that they did not intend the harm. The application to global warming should be clear. It is not unusual to go for joy rides. Such drivers do not intend any harm. Hence, we should not see my act of driving on a sunny Sunday afternoon as a cause of global warming or its harms .30 The demandingness objection has been dealt with by many authors.31 Here, a claim made by Liam Murphy is particularly appropriate. Murphy argued that in order to claim that a given moral requisite is over-demanding, one needs a view about acceptable levels of severity or acceptable kinds of demands. But in fact there are no settled views about those matters.32 Moreover, in the field of the morality of climate change, concerns about demandingness might sound as unduly conservative. Climate change is an absolute novelty, and we can expect that our common sense moralities are unfit to treat it, having being developed in a different context, in low-population and low-technology ages.33 As a consequence, the claim that the demands of the morality of climate change are over-demanding is questionbegging. Another route: limits coming from what is conceived as a due care duty. As to the alleged counter-productive outcomes issuing from requiring abstention from diffused activities such as driving cars and so on, it depends on which consequences are considered. It might turn out that issuing such demands results in disincentives to compliance for the 'worst offenders', as SinnottArmstrong puts it in the quotation above. However, this worry seems misplaced in so far as climate change is concerned. If threshold causation is the kind of causality leading to climate change, then there is simply no worst offender. Nobody is able to do worst than the average when production of future climate changes is considered. This is due to the fact that future climate alterations are the compounded outcome of very common and diffused actions. In this sort of cases, due care cannot be something different from abstention from very common and diffused acts. What is counter-productive, in climate change scenarios, is not providing disincentives for worst offenders, but rather failing to provide strong incentives to average people, 30 31 32 33 Sinnott-Armstrong 2010: 335. See See Murphy See Jamieson 2010: G. Pellegrino – Individual Responsibility for Climate Change 10 whose single actions join in creating bad effects. It might be argued also that it is difficult to make a case for negligence in this sort of cases, given the widespread popular scepticism and denials of the anthropogenic nature of climate change. Dale Jamieson voiced this objection: 'Perhaps a case could be made that present and future high emitters of greenhouse gases are negligent in this way, but it is not easy to make this case when it is widely believed that human action is not a primary cause of the climate change that is now underway.'34 This objection posits that the standards of diligence to be assumed in applying the strategic harm principle depends on factual degrees of care. Standards of care depends on how much normal people are willing to be concerned and diligent about a given issue. But, even though actual behaviour is to be taken into account in a certain measure, any plausible conception of due diligence has also a normative element. The standards of a reasonable diligence cannot be merely statistical ones. It is obvious enough that reasonable or due diligence is to be grounded on adequate information and knowledge, according to an ideal standard: persons are responsible of what they ought to know, not of what they actually know.35 Inconsiderate denials of firmly established scientific data about the human drivers of climate change should not be assumed as part of a standard of due diligence. The strategic harm principle, then, cannot be disconfirmed, or weakened, by the factual epistemic deficiencies, or even by the obduracy, of real people. It might seem that the strategic harm principle cancels the difference between responsibility for harms effectively done as a consequence of negligent conduct and responsibility for mere careless behaviour that does not cause damages.36 In a sense, this is true. Threshold causation implies that there is no possibility to trace future harms back to individual agents. Accordingly, the principle does not regulate in a backward-looking direction, i.e. on the basis of considerations concerning harms really done. On the other hand, this is exactly what happens in many legislative regulations, prescribing insurances, or forbidding potentially dangerous activities. No matter whether in specific cases harms ensue effectively from the forbidden behaviour, certain conducts and certain standards of diligence are prescribed.37 This prescription, however, responds to a concern about avoiding future harms. Accordingly, the strategic harm principle keeps intact its connection with the harm principle. Finally, indefinite content of the ideal of due care The strategic harm principle might remind us of a renowned discussion of similar cases in Parfit's Reasons and Persons.38 There, Parfit considered three kinds of acts: 1. individual actions having no relevant or no sufficient effects taken in isolation, but able to produce the best consequences when done together; 2. actions 34 35 36 37 38 Jamieson 2009, § 4. See also Vanderheiden 2008: 184, 186. See Vanderheiden 2008: 186-92. See Nagel 1979: 25, Vanderheiden 2008: 155-9. Obviously enough, penalties for transgression of precautionary principles are weaker than penalties for specific cases of harm inflictions – and this varying degrees of sanctioning strength can contribute to preserve the difference between mere careless behaviour and actual harm-doing. The strength of penalties inflicted on people transgressing the strategic harm principle in the morality of climate change is a topic worthy of a serious discussion. See Parfit 1984, ch. 3. G. Pellegrino – Individual Responsibility for Climate Change 11 having very small chances to produce good or bad outcomes; 3. actions having very small or imperceptible effects. He suggested that those acts should not be assessed in terms of their single consequences, but rather in terms of the net overall benefit of the cluster of actions they are added to, or they are part of. Therefore, one ought to perform any action that, added to a given group of actions, produces the best consequences. Moreover, one ought to do any of the actions that are part of a set of acts that together produce the best consequences.39 In addition, Parfit claimed that very small chances of beneficial or negative results should not be neglected when stakes are very high, or when great numbers of people will be concerned.40 Finally, he maintained that even tiny or imperceptible effects should be taken into account in our appraisal of actions.41 Despite similar in spirit, the strategic harm principle does not overlap with any of Parfit's proposals. The main dissimilarities are the following. First, Parfit considered only intentional actions, while the strategic harm principle covers also unintended consequences, when they arise out of negligence. Second, Parfit seems to endorse the idea that expected consequences provide a standard for the moral assessment of our individual actions, whereas the strategic harm principle is aimed at covering situations in which probability assessments are impossible. Third, Parfit considers not only effects beyond a given threshold – i.e. the effects obtained when enough people do a given action – but also the maximal effects – i.e. the effects ensuing when all of the members of a group act in a given way.42 By contrast, the strategic harm principle does not derive from a maximizing framework. It simply assumes that threshold effects are morally relevant, and that they impose specific precautionary standards. The strategic harm principle may look as a kind of precautionary principle, and it is such in a certain amount. However, there are some differences shielding the strategic harm principle from the objections raised to other kinds of precautionary principles.43 It should be noticed, for instance, that the principle does not deal with the scientific uncertainties concerning the climate system, but rather with the uncertainties of coordinated action. It is easily arguable that in considering coordinated actions of millions of people, there are special reasons to neglect, or even discount, information about likelihoods and this is a condition warranting a simple endorsement of a precautionary approach.44 There is a conceptual difference between scientific and strategic uncertainties. The former might be changing, and our knowledge might improve; the latter are doomed to unpredictability, at least on assumption of free will. Accordingly, a precautionary approach is justified in the field of strategic interaction, even though it might be challenged when one is facing small scientific uncertainties. 5. Conclusive remarks In § 3, the claim was that the notion of threshold causation provides the best model of climate change causation. In this model, certain individual actions concur in causing effects on climate in a discrete way. Individual actions are causally ineffectual till a given threshold of similar actions is not reached; after the threshold is trespassed, causation follows. 39 40 41 42 43 44 See Partift 1984: 67-73, 79. See Parfit 1984: 73-5. See Parfit 1984: 75-82. See principles (C11) and (C12) in Parfit 1984: 77, 81. See Gardiner 2006: 37-45, 49-58, Vanderheiden 2008: 216-19. See Gardiner 2006: 47. G. Pellegrino – Individual Responsibility for Climate Change 12 However, if threshold causation is the true analysis of climate change causation, the strategic harm principle presented in the previous section holds. But if this principle holds, individuals ought to be deemed responsible for their actions, no matter whether those actions are causally ineffectual taken in isolation, whether their authors intend the final outcomes, and whether they have control of them. The three conditions of moral responsibility listed in § 2, then, are not conditions of responsibility for climate change. Alternatively, it might be argued that the strategic harm principle makes salient a kind of causality that in other circumstances pass unnoticed. Therefore, in cases regulated by the strategic harm principle the condition of causality hold, and this is sufficient to warrant individual responsibility ascriptions.45 Possibly, the morality of climate change requires a revision of certain traditional philosophical accounts of moral responsibility, but not of our 'everyday understandings of moral responsibility'.46 The strategic harm principle comes from ordinary morality, and it seems perfectly apt to describe individual responsibility for future climate changes. Once this principle is endorsed, the traditional framework based on the harm principle can be applied to the morality of climate change. It is apparent that climate change raises new moral problems, and that it requires some revision of our common sense morality. However, this revision does not extend to our ordinary conception of individual responsibility. Unfortunately, we could not reject the hardships of the morality of climate change by pretending it does not concern our individual lives. References M.D. Alicke, 1992, “Culpable Causation”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, LXIII: 368-78 – , 2000, “Culpable Control and the Psychology of Blame”, Psychological Bulletin, CXXVI: 556-74 J. Driver, 2008, “Attribution of Causation and Moral Responsibility”, in Sinnott-Armstrong 2008: 423-39 S. Gardiner, 2006, “A Core Precautionary Principle”, The Journal of Political Philosophy, XIV: 33-60 S.M. Gardiner, S. Caney, D. Jamieson, H. Shue, eds., 2010, Climate Ethics. Essential Readings, Oxford University Press, Oxford J. Feinberg, 1970, Doing and Deserving, Princeton University Press, Princeton (NJ) H.L. Hart and T. Honoré, 1959, Causation in the Law, Clarendon Press, Oxford D. 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Sinnott-Armstrong, ed., 2008, Moral Psychology, vol. 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity, MIT Press, Cambridge (Mass.) – , 2010, “It's Not My Fault. Global Warming and Individual Moral Obligations”, in Gardiner et al. 2010: 332-46 S. Vanderheiden, 2008, Atmospheric Justice. A Political Theory of Climate Change, Oxford University Press, Oxford G. Pellegrino – Individual Responsibility for Climate Change