Backward-Looking Principles of Climate Justice: The Unjustified Move from the Polluter Pays Principle to the Beneficiary Pays Principle

Item Type

Language

English

Abstract

Climate change involves changes in the climate system caused by polluting human activities and the social and natural effects of these changes. The historical and anthropogenic grounds of climate change play an important role in climate justice claims. Many climate justice scholars believe that principles of climate justice should account for the historical and anthropogenic sources of climate change. Two main backward-looking principles have been proposed: the polluter pays principle (PPP) and the beneficiary pays principle (BPP). The BPP emerged in the literature on climate justice in response to certain objections raised against the PPP. In this paper, I focus on two of these objections: the causation objection and the excusable ignorance objection. Defenders of the BPP have traditionally assumed that this principle is not vulnerable to those objections, which renders the BPP superior to the PPP. In this paper, I challenge this underlying assumption. My argument here is simple: moving from the PPP to the BPP in response to any of these objections might be unjustified because the BPP is affected by at least some of the considerations giving rise to these objections.

Subject

Beneficiary pays principle
Causation
Climate justice
Excusable ignorance
Fairness
Legitimate expectations
Polluter pays principle

Publication Title

Publication Year

2022

Publication Date

2022-11-08

Journal abreviation

Res Publica

Source

Springer Link

License

ISSN

1572-8692

Short Title

Backward-Looking Principles of Climate Justice

Citer cette ressource

Backward-Looking Principles of Climate Justice: The Unjustified Move from the Polluter Pays Principle to the Beneficiary Pays Principle, dans Science & Ignorance, consulté le 21 Novembre 2024, https://ignorancestudies.inist.fr/s/science-ignorance/item/4600

Export