Climate Change : NOMOS LXVII

This volume focuses on three main questions surrounding the ethics and politics of climate change. The first concerns the limits of welfare economics, and of its utilitarian logic, as arguably still the dominant policy approach to climate change, and one which has loomed correspondingly large in intellectual approaches to the problem in many disciplines. Having a precise account of the limitations of welfare economics is necessary to develop not only new and more promising policy approaches, but also a more accurate account of our responsibilities towards existing and future generations.

The second question investigates the very nature of the problem of climate change. Is the latter better understood as a problem of economic inefficiency, distributive injustice, republican domination, or existential unfreedom? Can a diagnosis of climate injustice proceed independently of a critical analysis of the economic and power structures within which environmental harms are produced and reproduced?

Finally, there is the responsibility question. Which agents or entities (e.g. individuals, collectives, corporations, or structures) should be held morally responsible for climate change? To whom is such responsibility owed, e.g. existing people or not-yet-existing future generations? How should such responsibility, however attributed and distributed, be discharged, e.g. through a reduction of individual consumption, collective efforts at technological innovation, or by imposing immigration restrictions to limit population growth in high emitting countries?