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16Why a uniform carbon tax is unjust, no matter how the revenue is used, and should be accompanied by a limitarian carbon taxJournal of Global Ethics. forthcoming.A uniform carbon tax with equal per capita dividends is usually advocated as a cost-effective way of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions without increasing, and in many cases even reducing, economic inequality, in particular because of the positive balance between the carbon taxes paid by the worse off and the carbon dividends they receive back. In this article, I argue that a uniform carbon tax reform is unjust regardless of how the revenue is used, because it does not discourage the rich f…Read more
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2In this article we address the so-called argument of «individual causal inefficacy» (ICI), according to which CO2-emission-generating actions are morally neutral with regards to climate change, in so far as, taken in their singularity, they are neither sufficient nor necessary to cause climate change. In the first part, we address the main substantive objection to ICI: if a single emission, analysed in isolation, does not cause any disutility, it is impossible to explain why climate change (whic…Read more
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13Climate Change, the Non-identity Problem, and the Metaphysics of Transgenerational ActionsIn Pellegrino Gianfranco & Marcello Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Climate Change, Springer Nature. pp. 663-684. 2023.Why should one take action to move toward a greener world if doing so will cause the birth of a totally different group of future people? This chapter starts from the metaphysical evidence that many collective climate actions imply a change in the identity of future generations, as opposed to a counterfactual laissez-faire attitude. The climatic fallout from the non-identity paradox introduced by Derek Parfit is examined to determine if and how a principle of transgenerational responsibility can…Read more
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11Climate Change and the Circumstances of JusticeIn Pellegrino Gianfranco & Marcello Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Climate Change, Springer Nature. pp. 1065-1081. 2023.This chapter questions whether the objective circumstances of justice, and in particular the assumption of mutual advantage, apply to climate action. The first part of the chapter explains why two asymmetries, of benefits and costs, further exacerbated by intergenerational conflicts, both past and future oriented, make climate change an intricate multiplayer prisoner’s dilemma. The second part of the chapter analyses whether and how the two asymmetries can be scaled down, based on a series of em…Read more
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9The Compound Injustice of the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM)Ethics, Policy and Environment. forthcoming.EU co-legislators recently approved the EU carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM), which establishes a uniform carbon price on both EU and imported products, in ETS covered sectors. This violates the CBDR-RC principle. Yet, CBAM advocates claim that the resulting unfair mitigation can be offset by scaling up climate finance, to the benefit of poorer countries. I argue that the CBAM’s unfairness is compounded by previous climate injustice, as avoidable emissions by developed countries pushed t…Read more
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18The forward-looking polluter pays principle for a just climate transitionCritical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy. forthcoming.Climate justice demands polluters to take responsibility for both present and future harm caused by past GHG emissions and for future harm caused by future GHG emissions. One problem with this is double climate taxation: people living in historical polluting countries must both shoulder the burden of an effective and inclusive climate transition and repay the climate debt incurred by their predecessors. Although double climate taxation might be defensible on normative grounds, it risks making cl…Read more
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18Transgenerational Social Structures and Fictional Actors: Community-Based Responsibility for Future GenerationsThe Monist 106 (2): 150-164. 2023.The notion of transgenerational community is usually based on two diachronic interactions. The first interaction consists of present generations taking up the legacy (not only economic, but also institutional, artistic, cultural, and so forth) of past generations and giving it continuity, exercising a form of active agency. The second interaction occurs when present generations pass on their legacy to future generations. This is supposed to expand the boundaries of the community in a transgenera…Read more
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22Global Climate Justice: Theory and Practice (edited book)This book offers philosophical and interdisciplinary insights into global climate justice with a view to climate neutrality by the middle of the twenty-first century. The first section brings together a series of introductory contributions on the state of the climate crisis, covering scientific, historical, diplomatic and philosophical dimensions. The second section focuses on the challenges of justice and responsibility to which the climate crisis exposes and will expose the global community in…Read more
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49Why we need future generations: a defence of direct intergenerational reciprocityEconomics and Philosophy 39 (3): 395-422. 2023.In this article I argue that the non-reciprocity problem does not apply to intergenerational justice. Future generations impact, here and now, on the well-being of people now living. I firstly illustrate the economic-synchronic model of direct intergenerational reciprocity (DIR): future generations allow people now living to maintain the economic system future-oriented and capital-preserving. The rational choice for people now living is to guarantee transgenerational sufficiency to future genera…Read more
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13Kant on Remote Working: a Moral DefencePhilosophy of Management 21 (2): 265-279. 2021.In this article I maintain that when employers could free workers from the space constraint of the office without incurring unbearable economic losses, it is morally wrong not to grant workers the possibility to work remotely, as this violates the humanity formulation of Kant’s categorical imperative. The article therefore aims to contribute to the development of Kantian business ethics, taking into account a series of empirical evidence gathered in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. I firstly d…Read more
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25The Disaggregation Of Climate Induced HarmTeorema: International Journal of Philosophy 41 (1): 29-50. 2022.In this article I hold that utilitarians are wrong to want to disaggregate climate- induced harm, whether in terms of chaotic or linear causality. This is not because individual emissions do not count, in probabilistic terms, for risk projections of overall climate dam- age, rather because individual emissions only contribute to increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration if the anthropogenic flow of CO2 exceeds the amount of CO2 that can be naturally taken up by the biosphere, over a given time se…Read more
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301Climate Change, Individual Preferences, and ProcrastinationIn Corey Katz & Sarah Kenehan (eds.), Climate Justice and Feasibility: Normative Theorizing, Feasibility Constraints, and Climate Action, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. pp. 193-211. 2021.When discussing the general inertia in climate change mitigation, it is common to approach the analysis either in terms of epistemic obstacles (climate change is too scientifically complex to be fully understood by all in its dramatic nature and/or to find space in the media) and/or moral obstacles (the causal link between polluting actions and social damage is too loose, both geographically and temporally, to allow individuals to understand the consequences of their emissions). In this chapter …Read more
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39Kant on Remote Working: a Moral DefencePhilosophy of Management (2): 1-15. 2021.In this article I maintain that when employers could free workers from the space constraint of the office without incurring unbearable economic losses, it is morally wrong not to grant workers the possibility to work remotely, as this violates the humanity formulation of Kant’s categorical imperative. The article therefore aims to contribute to the development of Kantian business ethics, taking into account a series of empirical evidence gathered in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. I firstly d…Read more
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194An egalitarian carbon tax: revenue-neutral and dual policy packageWEA (World Economics Association) Commentaries 11 (3): 2-4. 2021.In this article I maintain that a progressive and leftist carbon tax should be revenue-neutral through a dual policy package: first, it should use some revenues to offset price increases for the poor and middle classes; second, it should use the remaining part of revenues to lower taxes on labour income (both employed and self-employed income) for those below a middle-income threshold. I will briefly examine three reasons why such a revenue-neutral and dual-package carbon tax (RN-DP-CT) could (a…Read more
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26The Covid-19 Pandemic and Climate Change: Some Lessons Learned on Individual Ethics and Social JusticeRevista Portuguesa de Filosofia 77 (2-3): 691-714. 2021.The Covid-19 pandemic has confronted humanity with a complex and unexpected challenge. One part of this challenge concerned individual ethics, i.e., the behaviour of individuals with respect to the rules and restrictions that have been imposed by health authorities in the collective interest. Another part concerned, instead, the social organisation of immunisation campaigns. In this article I wonder whether the lessons we have learned in the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic can be applied to …Read more
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32Global Justice, Markets and Domination: A Cosmopolitan TheoryEdward Elgar. 2020.This thought-provoking book analyses the process of labour commodification, through which the individual’s ability to earn a basic living becomes dependent on the conditions of the market relationship. Building on the premise that the separation of a group of individuals from the means of production is an intrinsic element of capitalism, Fausto Corvino theorises that this implies a form of domination in a neo-republican sense. Proposing an original theory of global justice denoted as a minimum d…Read more
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382Compensation for Energy Infrastructures: Can a Capability Approach be More Equitable?Journal of Human Development and Capabilities 22 (2): 197-217. 2021.In this article, we deal with the evaluation of the losses suffered by persons living in urban areas as a result of energy services. In the first part, we analyse how by adopting different informational foci we obtain contrasting interpersonal evaluations regarding the same loss. In the second part, we distinguish between a diachronic and a hypothetical/moralised threshold for harm in order to assess whether individuals are benefiting from or being harmed by a given energy service. Our argument …Read more
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166Tassare l’Anidride Carbonica Per Ridurre il Cuneo Fiscale: Una Proposta Per la Sinistra EuropeaEconomia E Politica 1-5. 2021.Molti esperti concordano sul fatto che la pandemia di Covid-19 sia l'occasione giusta per iniziare a tassare l’anidride carbonica, ora che la domanda e quindi anche il prezzo dei combustibili fossili sono scesi. Tuttavia, la carbon tax continua ad essere vista con sospetto, soprattutto tra i progressisti, che temono che questa misura abbia effetti regressivi. Allo stesso tempo, i sostenitori di una carbon tax a entrate positive, che finanzi investimenti in progetti ecologici, rischiano di allarm…Read more
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297La Giustizia Globale al Tempo della Globalizzazione ConvergenteNotizie di Politeia (136): 185-204. 2019.Globalisation has come under severe pressure at the exact moment when some of those we used to regard as the winners of the global market have started to lose from it. Or, in other words, globalisation is going through the most serious drawback since the post-war era just when divergent growth between countries has inverted its trend, thus becoming convergent. In this article I argue that convergent globalisation poses a serious theoretical challenge to the idea of global justice. More precisely…Read more
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228Discharging the moral responsibility for collective unjust enrichment in the global economyTheoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 36 (1): 139-158. 2021.In this article we wonder how a person can discharge the political responsibility for supporting and benefiting from unjust social structures. Firstly, we introduce the concept of structural injustice and defend it against three possible objections: ‘explanatory nationalism’, a diachronic interpretation of the benefits of industry-led growth, being part of a social structure does not automatically mean being responsible for its negative consequences. Then, we hold that both Iris Marion Young’s ‘…Read more
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414Sweatshops, Harm and Exploitation: A Proposal to Operationalise the Model of Structural InjusticeConatus 5 (2): 9-23. 2020.In this article, I firstly discuss the person-affecting view of harm, distinguishing between the liability and the structural models of responsibility, and also explaining why it is unsatisfactory, from a moral point of view, to interpret a given harm as a loss with respect to a diachronic baseline. Then, I take sweatshops as an example and I entertain two further issues that are related to the assessment of harm and that are necessary for operationalising a comprehensive model of responsibility…Read more
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40Samuel Scheffler, Why Worry About Future Generations?, (Oxford/new York: Oxford University Press), 2018 (review)Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (1): 403-405. 2021.
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215Lifting lockdown – a tragedy of the commonsopenDemocracy. 2020.The lifting of lockdown is a typical case of the tragedy of the commons, and as such should be regulated by public authority, instead of being left to the ethics and responsibility of single individuals. I would therefore argue that we should think about an intermediate phase between the lockdown and the opening of shops (which in the Italian case is the transition from the red zone to the orange zone): diversified access to commercial activities, on an hourly basis, for different population gro…Read more
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36The Moral Implications of the Global Basic Structure as a Subject of JusticeGlocialism. Journal of culture, politics and innovation 2019 (2): 1-36. 2019.In this article, I discuss whether the theory of justice as fairness famously proposed by John Rawls can justify the implementation of global principles of socioeconomic justice, contrary to what Rawls himself maintains. In particular, I dwell on the concept of the basic structure of society, which Rawls defines as “the primary subject of justice” and considers as a prerogative of domestic societies. In the first part, I briefly present Rawls’s theory of socio-economic justice and his account of…Read more
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221Utility, Priorities, and Quiescent SufficiencyEtica & Politica / Ethics & Politics 21 (3): 525-552. 2019.In this article, I firstly discuss why a prioritarian clause can rescue the utilitarian doctrine from the risk of exacerbating inequality in the distribution of resources in those cases in which utility of income does not decline at the margin. Nonetheless, when in the presence of adaptive preferences, classic prioritarianism is more likely than utilitarianism to increase the inequality of resources under all circumstances, independently of the diminishing trend of utility. Hence, I propose to s…Read more
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8Energy Justice and Intergenerational Ethics: Theoretical Perspectives and Institutional DesignsIn Gunter Bombaerts, Kirsten Jenkins, Yekeen A. Sanusi & Wang Guoyu (eds.), Energy Justice Across Borders, Springer Verlag. pp. 253-272. 2019.In this work, we discuss how both contractualism, in the Western tradition, and communitarianism, in the African interpretation based on the idea of Ubuntu, conceptualise intergenerational justice. Even though both philosophical theories, taking into account differences and shortcomings, provide theoretical answers to intergenerational justice dilemmas, the implementation of actual policies in the interest of future individuals does not follow straightforwardly. Accordingly, in the second part o…Read more
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28Jan-Christoph Heilinger: Cosmopolitan Responsibility - Global Injustice, Relational Equality, and Individual Agency: Berlin/boston: De Gruyter, 2020. Hardcover (ISBN: 9783110600780). € 69.95. 255 + xii pp (review)Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 23 (3): 685-687. 2020.
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479The Non-Identity Objection to Intergenerational Harm: A Critical Re-ExaminationInternational Journal of Applied Philosophy 33 (2): 165-185. 2019.In this article I analyse those that I consider the most powerful counterarguments that have been advanced against the non-identity objection to the idea of intergenerational harm, according to which an action cannot cause harm to a given agent if her biological identity does actually depend—in a partial but still determinant way—on the performance of this action. In doing this, I firstly go through the deontological criticisms to the person-affecting view of harm, before moving on to sufficient…Read more
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39Kant on Human Progress and Global InequalityRevista Portuguesa de Filosofia 75 (1): 477-512. 2019.In this article I discuss whether from Kant’s philosophy we can determine a moral duty to deal with global inequality, a problem that in Kant’s time was inexistent since it is a modern trend resulting from the industrial revolution. In doing this, I consider three main issues related to Kant’s thought and partially re-developed by contemporary authors: the individual moral duty to collaborate with nature’s purposiveness, which is aimed at attaining perpetual peace through humans fully developing…Read more
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48Republican Freedom in the Labour Market: Exploitation Without Interpersonal DominationTheoria 66 (158): 103-131. 2019.In this article, I query whether participation in the labour market can hinder neo-republican freedom as non-domination. I briefly present the view of Philip Pettit on the topic, based on the distinction between offering a reward and threatening a punishment. I compare it to the analysis of labour republicans, recently reconstructed by Alex Gourevitch, according to whom, the exclusion of a group of individuals from the control of productive assets represents a form of structural domination. Then…Read more
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Université Catholique de LouvainHoover Chair In Economic and Social EthicsMarie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow In Philosophy
Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium