Alex McLaughlin

This paper argues that reductivism, the dominant form of contemporary just war theory, cannot justify violent climate protest, despite Andreas Malm's suggestion that just war theory might help confront the challenge of the climate crisis. The argument has three stages. It begins by showing both the relevance of Malm's attacks on the climate movement's strategic pacifism to questions about the appropriateness of violence in climate activism in political philosophy and the dominance of reductivism in contemporary philosophical discussions of violence. It then shows that reductivism's individualism will make it difficult to establish liability for climate harms substantial enough to be met with defensive force. Finally, it argues that violent climate protest is unlikely to be necessary to protect individuals, since it will not effectively reduce individual vulnerability to climate change. The collective character of the threat of climate change is in tension with reductivism's commitment to justifying all violence in terms of individual defensive rights.

Despite advancing strong claims about our collective priorities, longtermism has received little attention in debates in political philosophy. I first provide an account of longtermism that highlights the way it departs from established work on intergenerational justice. The view offers a novel account of the value of the future and is concerned about existential risks that might curtail that value. I then argue that longtermism's focus on existential risk is implausible, leading proponents to adopt unattractive political positions. In particular, I show that Toby Ord’ “grand strategy” for humanity is antidemocratic and elitist, and that William MacAskill's “political experimentalism” implies a crude libertarianism. Longtermists are uninterested in political thought and often seem unaware of the strength of the positions they adopt, or indeed of how those positions depart from those of fellow advocates.

A central question in debates about climate justice concerns how the global emissions sink should be shared among the global population over time. This paper considers how global egalitarians should answer that question. In particular, it defends emissions egalitarianism from a view known as ‘integrationism’, according to which shares of the emissions sink should follow from a more general egalitarian theory of distributive justice. First, I show that emissions egalitarianism can draw on a source of functional support not adequately acknowledged in the integrationist critique: it can express an underlying account of the structure of historical responsibility for climate change I call the Fair Share View. Second, I claim that integrationism is also in tension with other principles of responsibility for climate change, and that its scepticism about historical responsibility has not been appreciated. Finally, I provide an alternative to integrationism. My central claim is that integrationism posits too direct a relation between a theory of equality of wellbeing and practical questions about claims to the emissions sink. Egalitarians should appeal to a species of derivative principle I call ‘applied principles of global justice’, and emissions egalitarianism could plausibly be endorsed on these grounds.

Climate change is often described as an existential risk to the human species, but this terminology has generally been avoided in the climate-justice literature in analytic philosophy. I investigate the source of this disconnect and explore the prospects for incorporating the idea of climate change as an existential risk into debates about climate justice. The concept of existential risk does not feature prominently in these discussions, I suggest, because assumptions that structure ‘ideal’ accounts of climate justice ensure that the prospect of climate change as an extinction-level threat does not arise. Given persistent noncompliance with mitigation duties, however, we have reason to revisit these assumptions. I argue that the most promising way for theories of climate justice to account for the significance of existential risk is to look to the practices of protest and resistance in which a concern about extinction or global catastrophe is frequently given expression.

This paper argues that climate injustice will be compounded in the future as a result of the deferred nature of many climate impacts. My claim is that the temporal disconnect between emissions and climate harm threatens future people’s ability to access what I call “resistance goods,” which rely on forms of address, often realised in oppositional political action. I identify three resistance goods—self-assertion, solidarity and testimony—and show that each is threatened by the temporality of climate change. A compound of climate injustice is that it will be experienced as demeaning, isolating and silencing by many future people.

An increasingly popular approach to global justice claims we should be ‘integrationist,’ where integrationism represents an attempt to unify our theorising between different domains of global politics. These political theorists have argued that we cannot identify plausible principles in one domain, such as climate justice, which are not sensitive to general moral concerns. This paper argues we ought to reject the concept of integrationism. It shows that integrationism is either trivial, or it obscures relevant disagreement by ignoring the distinctive methodological and substantive commitments held by its opponents. The paper then argues that the relevant disagreement is actually about the role of practices for political philosophy and, as such, should be framed in terms of the distinction between practice-dependent and practice-independent theory. Finally, I provide my own account of that distinction, identifying a practice-dependent claim that those concerned about the narrowness of prominent accounts of global justice should target.

This article revisits a principle of distributive justice accepted by most, if not all, scholars of climate justice. The principle at stake, the limit, protects those who are very badly off from bearing the costs of climate change mitigation. The persistent noncompliance of developed states with their obligations toward burden sharing, however, means that this principle is increasingly in tension with successful climate change mitigation, given it seems to require that those in poverty have continued access to emissions in cases where alternative forms of energy are not provided. In the first half of the paper I outline this tension and show how the dominant expression of the limit in the literature, advanced by Henry Shue, must be abandoned. I argue that any attempt to articulate the limit in current circumstance, where the carbon budget is very scarce, must consider the climate harm associated with continued subsistence emissions. The second half of the article defends a principle, the exemption, which is best able to maintain the strong commitment to shielding those below the minimal threshold from the costs of mitigation, even in light of the potential harm that will result if they require emissions to fuel their energy needs.