As climate change accelerates, insisting that we’re all in it together glosses over the reality that some are up to their necks in it while others are barely getting their feet wet. The rhetoric of solidarity rings especially hollow when you remember that the industrialised nations got us into this hole in the first place.
The issue of richer countries compensating for the “loss and damage” suffered by poorer countries was the COP27 summit’s biggest sticking point. In the end, a fund was established. But, as with the unfulfilled COP15 promise of $100bn a year to help poorer nations cut emissions and adapt to rising temperatures, it’s doubtful whether enough countries will pay in sufficient money.
A blunt explanation for this inaction was offered by the European Commission’s Frans Timmermans in September. He set out the argument for climate aid, but also said: “Let’s be frank, many of our citizens in Europe will not buy this argument” because “what is closer to your own worries is always bigger on your agenda than somebody else’s worries.” The implication—that the most effective strategy would be to appeal to enlightened self-interest—is surely right.
Still, there are strong moral arguments for compensating poorer nations for climate damage. Standardly, the moral imperative is framed as a matter of restorative justice: the perpetrators of the wrongdoing need to fix the harm. This principle has a strong vintage. John Locke was one of the first to set out the case for reparations: when someone “receives damage” by a transgression, then “he who hath received any damage, has… a particular right to seek reparation from him that has done it.” Locke’s principle gives the victim a right to appropriate “the goods or service of the offender”.
But who is the offender in the climate case? Most people who set the world on the fossil-fuelled road to disaster are dead. Their descendants are, if not blameless, less guilty. We can all say “amen” to the principle in Ezekiel that “The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son.” What’s more, to be responsible for an action it must be clear you knew, or should have known, it would have bad consequences. But much of the harm was caused before it was widely accepted that fossil fuels had catastrophic consequences.
Without the retrospective dimension to reparations, making current polluters pay would create its own injustice. It is harsh to blame those who inherited climate-warming infrastructure, such as gas heating systems, when alternatives are beyond their means. Nor is it fair to demand that countries such as China pay sin taxes, when these were avoided by countries that industrialised earlier. And if compensation payments were based on emissions per capita, a poorer state such as Trinidad and Tobago would have to pay proportionately more than Finland.
Our duty stems from the urgency of our fellow humans’ need
One study estimated that countries potentially eligible for loss and damage payments will suffer climate costs between $1,132bn and $1,741bn a year by 2050. There aren’t enough clear-cut culprits from which to demand such reparations. Energy firms who knew the harm they were doing decades ago and buried the research should be held to account, but the sums needed are way above anything that could be seized from them.
An obvious way to extend responsibility is to argue that people who benefit from wrongdoing have a duty to give up those benefits if the wrongdoing comes to light. So, in UK law, you are not the legal owner of stolen goods even if you bought them in good faith. But the beneficiaries of industrialisation are not in the same position as a thief. There is no obvious initial transgression and nothing material to return. Young westerners in particular seem to be too far removed from any wrongdoing to be obliged to rectify it at huge cost.
The reparations argument leads to a moral quagmire. Forget blame and liability, however, and the core injustice is clear: through accident of birth, the poorest of the world are going to suffer most, as they live in countries less able to afford mitigation and more likely to flood or overheat. John Rawls famously argued that to decide what political arrangement is just, you should imagine what kind of system you would choose to live under if you didn’t know where in that society you would end up. The thought experiment suggests no one should endorse a system of global governance in which poorer countries are left to fry or sink.
But why not just be selfish? David Hume and Adam Smith both argued that the basis of morality was not any abstract theory but a kind of moral sympathy. We are motivated to relieve suffering when we see it. If fellow feeling is not enough to motivate a person to act with compassion, no argument will move them, only coercion. A country like Britain has to play its part, but not because of past guilt. Our duty stems from our unearned present privilege and the urgency of our fellow humans’ need.
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Each month Julian Baggini will offer a philosophical view on current events, based on readers’ suggestions.
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