Steve Vanderheiden

Does the receipt of benefits from some common resource create an obligation to contribute toward its maintenance? If so, what is the basis of this obligation? I consider whether individual contributions to climate change can be impugned as wrongful free riding upon the stability of the planet's climate system, when persons enjoy its benefits but refuse to bear their share of its maintenance costs. Two main arguments will be advanced: the first urges further modification of H.L.A. Hart’s “principle of fairness” as the basis for demanding that would-be free riders pay their fair share in the context of climate change, while the second claims that remedial action on climate change is better captured through collective action analysis than through harm principles that seek to connect individual actions to bad environmental outcomes

William Cronon has recently argued that the current debate concerning justifications for protecting wilderness relies upon conceptions of natural value premised upon a nature/society dualism that originated in older nature writing but which still animates contemporary thinking. This dualism, he argues, prevents adequate realization of the human and social places in nature, and is ultimately counterproductiveto the task of articulating the proper relationship between humans and the natural world. While the origin of one of these conceptions of natural value (the frontier) can be traced back to Rousseau, I argue that Rousseau’s writings reveal a far more complex and nuanced treatment of the value of nature in and for society (and the persons that compose it) than has thus far been acknowledged. Moreover, by unpacking several arguments made by Rousseau on behalf of the stewardship and accessibility of natural areas, one can not only gain a more accurate view of Rousseau’s environmental thought than is ordinarily recognized by authors who focus on his primitivism and anti-modern critique, but also some insights that may help bridge the nature/society dualism plaguing contemporary environmental ethics and noted by Cronon.

The current debate surrounding the implementation of the Kyoto Treaty raises several issues that ought to be of interest to social and political philosophers. Proponents and critics alike have invoked ideas of fairness in justification of their positions. The two distinct conceptions of fairness that are involved in this debate—one of fair shares, and another of fair burdens—helpfully illuminate the proper role of fairness in designing an equitable and effective global climate regime. In this paper, I critically examine the idea of fairness as manifest in two contending visions of the proper international response to mounting evidence that human activity is causing climate change, and that harm from this change is likely to exacerbate existing inequalities. In addition, I recommend one idea of fairness (the fair shares conception) and the political program that it implies.

The politics of food illustrates an enduring tension within environmental ethics and green political theory: the oft-assumed division between those thinkers for whom humanitarian goals remain prominent but who situate them within a normative framework stressing environmental sustainability and those thinkers who reject any distinctively humanitarian interests as untenably anthropocentric. In posing the problem as a moral dilemma between feeding people and saving nature, light and dark green value theories are made to appear in stark contrast, with the former prescribing the delivery of food aid to relieve hunger-related suffering, and the latter rejecting that call. This supposed dilemma between feeding people and saving nature is a false one. The real problem is a moral elitism on the part of developed countries where an insidious form of selfishness overemphasizes the role of population and obscures the roles of highly variable rates of consumption upon current environmental ills. An examination of theexemplary case of food politics shows that the exaggerated differences in policy implications of these two value theories can be diminished and that there is potential for common cause.