Mattias Gunnemyr

Measuring corporate contributions to climate change is often crucial for investors, policymakers and legal frameworks. Current methods use attributional carbon footprint metrics, which quantify emissions linked to a company's activities. Despite its widespread use, this approach faces challenges like ‘brown spinning’ and fails to account for substitution effects. In response, some advocate for consequential metrics, which consider alternative scenarios and counterfactuals to measure the impact of corporate actions on global emissions. This paper critically examines both approaches, arguing that while attributional metrics are flawed, consequential metrics often require infeasible levels of predictive precision and counterfactual analysis. We propose that different contexts and purposes warrant different approaches. For some purposes and contexts, like carbon taxation, a restricted attributional method that focuses exclusively on Scope 1 is suitable. For other purposes, like setting Environmental, Social, and Governance ratings, we suggest an elaborated attributional framework that also accounts for indirect causal contributions not captured by standard Scopes 1–3 emissions. In yet other cases, standard or elaborated forms of consequential metrics may be more suitable.

The anthology Collective Action, Philosophy and Law brings together two key strands of philosophical inquiry: social ontology and jurisprudence. Most of the papers use collective agency as a starting point to get a better grasp on collective entities and activities in the legal domain, but others reverse the approach and use legal examples to refine theories of collective agency. The introduction provides a comprehensive overview of the literature on collective agency, emphasizing issues in jurisprudence and legal practices where collective agency plays a central role. It also offers a detailed overview of the anthology’s structure and contents. With thirteen papers organized into four parts, the anthology covers a broad spectrum of topics. While each paper deserves in-depth exploration, this review will provide a brief summary of all the papers, followed by concise discussions of the contributions of Sara Rachel Chant and Bill Wringe.

How do we best measure degrees of causal contribution? Dependence theorists argue that causal strength is determined by the difference it makes, but this approach yields counterintuitive results in cases of overdetermination and pre-emption. Production theorists propose measuring an event’s causal contribution by the number of sets of actual events sufficient for the effect where the cause is necessary, yet they face challenges in pre-emption and switching cases. I propose an account that combines dependence and minimal sufficiency theories, avoiding these counterintuitive implications. This account states that the causal contribution of C to E is a function of the difference C makes to E’s security (a dependency function), provided that C is causally connected to E (a production requirement). If C is not causally connected to E, its contribution is zero. Additionally, it remains unclear whether the degree of causal contribution depends on proximity to necessity or sufficiency. These are the necessity and sufficiency criteria for causal contributions. The proposed function can be adjusted to capture either criterion, using one formula for the sufficiency view and another for the necessity view.

In collective harm cases, bad consequences follow if enough people act in a certain way even though no such individual act makes a difference for the worse. Global warming, overfishing and Derek Parfit’s famous case of the harmless torturers are some examples of such harm. Shelly Kagan argues that there is a threshold such that one single act might trigger harm in all collective harm cases. Julia Nefsky points to serious shortcomings in Kagan’s argument, but does not show that his conclusion is incorrect. I argue that our best theories of vagueness (the epistemic view of vagueness, three-valued logic, and supervaluationism) entail that there is a threshold in all collective harm cases. However, my analysis points to another problem with Kagan’s argument: the thresholds are not necessarily perceptible. Given the assumption that only perceptible differences matter morally, passing such a threshold does not necessarily trigger morally relevant harm, pace Kagan. Last, I consider two variants of Kagan’s argument and find both problematic. One controversially assumes that observational relations like ‘cannot perceive the difference between’ are transitive. The other problematically assumes that so called triangulation always is possible.

In his contribution to this special issue, Hindriks considers the Security Principle, an account of pro tanto obligations based on our account of reasons (Gunnemyr and Touborg 2023a). According to the Security Principle, you have a pro tanto obligation not to perform an action that makes a harm more secure. Hindriks raises two objections to this account. First, that it is too flexible; second, that it gives wrong verdicts when agents are robustly unwilling to act in a certain way. Here, we respond to Hindriks’ objections and argue that Hindriks’ account, the Threshold Principle, gives counterintuitive verdicts in preemption and low-probability cases.

Iris Marion Young presents a social connection model on which those, and only those, who participate in structural processes that produce injustice have a forward-looking responsibility to redress the resulting injustice by challenging the structures that produce it. In Young's view, this is an all-things-considered, albeit discretionary, responsibility. I argue that participation in a structural process that produces injustice is neither necessary nor sufficient for having political responsibilities, and that therefore the social connection model must be rejected. A subtler model is needed, one that depicts participation in a structural process that produces injustice as sufficient for having pro tanto forward-looking responsibilities to redress the process, unless the participating agent satisfies certain excusing conditions. I suggest the intuitive force of the thought that mere participation gives us political responsibilities can be explained by more fundamental considerations. Hastily, we might conclude that all participants have political responsibilities simply because most of them satisfy at least one of the following conditions: they cause injustice to continue, they are morally responsible for injustice, they benefit from injustice, they have communal ties with the victims of injustice, or they have the capacity to redress injustice.

In On What Matters Derek Parfit advocates the Kantian Contractualist Formula as one of three supreme moral principles. In important cases, this formula entails that it is wrong for an agent to act in a way that would be partially best. In contrast, Parfit’s wide value-based objective view of reasons entails that the agent often have sufficient reasons to perform such acts. It seems then that agents might have sufficient reasons to act wrongly. In this paper I will argue that such reasons are a symptom of a fundamental inconsistency between the Kantian Contractualist Formula and Parfit’s view of reasons. The formula requires that we consider what everyone could rationally will, while a wide value-based objective view requires that we consider only what the agent has sufficient reasons for doing. The same inconsistency is particularly obvious in Parfit’s version of the Consent Principle, which share important features with the Kantian Contractualist Formula. Parfit accepts that moral principles might entail that we sometimes have sufficient reasons to act wrongly. However, to accept that supreme moral principles have such implications is objectionable if you, like Parfit, also hold that principles with such implications should be rejected or revised. I suggest that we could abandon the requirement that we have to consider the reasons of everyone. This would make the Kantian Contractualist Formula consistent with Parfit’s view of reasons, at least in this respect. I also argue that we can keep most implications of the Kantian Contractualist Formula that Parfit finds attractive.

We refine the intuitively appealing idea that you are blameworthy for something if it happened because you did not care enough. More formally: you are blameworthy for X (where X may be an action, omission, or outcome) just in case there is the right causal-explanatory relation between your poor quality of will and X. First, we argue that blameworthiness for actions, omissions, and outcomes is concerned with negative differences: you are blameworthy for the fact that X occurred instead of X*, where X is worse than X*. Second, we argue that the way in which your quality of will is poor has to fit what you are blameworthy for. With these refinements, the account already gives intuitively correct verdicts in cases of forgetting, making a negative difference to a nevertheless good result, and doing an action with runaway consequences. We then discuss what the right causal-explanatory relation is and suggest that it is simply causation, understood in the right way. Here, we draw on the account of causation developed in Caroline Torpe Touborg’s “The Dual Nature of Causation.” According to this account, there are two necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for causation. Roughly, C causes E rather than E* iff (1) C is process-connected to E, and (2) C makes E more secure and E* less secure. With this account of causation, our account of blameworthiness now also gives correct verdicts in omission, pre-emption, and switching cases, Frankfurt-style cases, and collective harm cases.

Do I cause global warming, climate change and their related harms when I go for a leisure drive with my gas-guzzling car? The current verdict seems to be that I do not; the emissions produced by my drive are much too insignificant to make a difference for the occurrence of global warming and its related harms. I argue that our verdict on this issue depends on what we mean by ‘causation’. If we for instance assume a simple counterfactual analysis of causation according to which ‘C causes E’ means ‘if C had not occurred, E would not have occurred’, we must conclude that a single drive does not cause global warming. However, this analysis of causation is well-known for giving counterintuitive results in some important cases. If we instead adopt Lewis’s analysis of causation, it turns out that it is indeterminate whether I cause global warming when I go for a single drive. Still, in contexts where we seek to control or understand global warming, there is a pressure to adopt a more fragile view of this event. When we adopt such a view, it turns out that a single drive does cause global warming. This means that we cannot like Sinnott-Armstrong and Kingston and Sinnott-Armstrong reject the idea that I should refrain from going for a leisure drive simply because such a drive does not cause global warming.

In this paper, we present a new account of teleological reasons, i.e. reasons to perform a particular action because of the outcomes it promotes. Our account gives the desired verdict in a number of difficult cases, including cases of overdetermination and non-threshold cases like Parfit’s famous _Drops of water._ The key to our account is to look more closely at the metaphysics of causation. According to Touborg (_The dual nature of causation_, 2018), it is a necessary condition for causation that a cause increases the security of its effect. Building on this idea, we suggest, roughly, that you have a teleological reason to act in a certain way when doing so increases the security of some good outcome. This represents a middle way between the proposal that you have a reason to act in a certain way just in case this _would_ cause a good outcome and the proposal that you have a reason to act in a certain way just in case this _could_ cause a good outcome.