Säde Hormio

Our doxastic conduct can be assessed from moral, epistemic and prudential perspectives. You might believe against the evidence, wrong others by believing certain things of them, or be unwise in cherishing a belief that is harmful to you. But how do we identify what kind of norm one violates in a given case? Developing further a framework put forth by Kauppinen (2018), we argue that the norms that bind us can be categorized to different normative domains by identifying what would be the fitting reaction toward the norm violator. We demonstrate that this way of distinguishing epistemic from non-epistemic norms entails that there are no purely epistemic positive norms. We argue that cases in which intuitively one is required to form a specific belief, can be explained without positing positive duties. In some cases the subject’s suspension of judgment is grounded in a violation of a negative epistemic norm, and in other cases one is morally or prudentially required to believe.

In this précis of three of the chapters of my book Taking Responsibility for Climate Change (2024), I explain why collective responsibility must be construed widely to grasp the scope of climate change responsibility. Individuals can share responsibility to take mitigation action as members or constituents of collectives and groups of several kinds. If we try to frame climate change responsibility exclusively from either the collective or the individual perspective, we leave out a crucial element of collective and shared responsibility—namely, how we are all influenced by the collectives we belong to and how, in turn, collectives are influenced by individuals. I look first at organized collective action and shared responsibility as members of collective agents, followed by a discussion on the shared responsibility of constituents of unorganized collectives. I also discuss how misinformation tactics have been deployed to delay meaningful climate action, thereby derailing democratic decision-making processes. Collective agents involved in such activities bear responsibility for their actions.

Even with events like the Capitol attack, it is misguided to focus too much on the possible epistemic failures of individuals. Instead, the focus should be on the collective underpinnings of bad beliefs (such as false beliefs about a stolen election), and especially on the collective agents who peddle in misinformation. We can divide the collective agents that pollute our epistemic neighborhoods roughly into those that do so for ideological or other such reasons (misbelievers), and those that do so for instrumental reasons (disinformers), although in practice these categories can overlap. These two motivations impact the responsibility of the collective agents that help to create bad epistemic neighborhoods. While misbelieving is more culpable in a purely epistemic sense, being a disinformer is more culpable in a moral sense. Epistemic institutions present a special case for the responsibility of collective agents. Although collective agents can present us with clear cases of culpability in epistemic matters, when dealing with consumers of fake news and misinformation, we should proceed with a certain level of epistemic humility.

Collective action and responsibility have gained increased attention in the past decades. The influence of collective agents on our lives and the prevalence of collective harms, such as climate change, has brought the collective nature of human action into the spotlight. Philosophers have addressed these issues from the viewpoint of social ontology and political philosophy. Despite their complementary focus on the nature of collective action and agency on the one hand and the nature of political action on the other, the two strands of philosophical literature have seen relatively little cross-pollination so far. This volume aims to bring these two strands a little closer to one another, aiming to expand the range of issues within political philosophy to which conceptual resources for understanding collective responsibility developed within the field of social ontology can be applied. At the same time, we aim to also shed new light on issues that have been staples of discussion within the social ontology literature, including the extent to which collective agents can be understood as moral agents and, hence, as bearers of a kind of collective moral responsibility.

The starting position for this book is that not only states and international bodies have a responsibility to take action to mitigate climate change. Other collective agents need to also be considered and to come onboard. This includes corporations and other companies, regional and local governments and their organisations, cities, banks, pension funds, non-governmental organisations, art and culture establishments, universities and other educational institutions, sports associations, and so on and so forth. The main claim of the book is that collective responsibility must be construed widely to grasp the scope of climate change responsibility. Climate change requires an all-hands-on-deck approach at this point in time. The second main claim in the book is that although collective agents should be at the forefront of mitigation efforts, their responsibility should not be discussed in isolation of the responsibility of their members. Framing climate change responsibility exclusively from either the collective or the individual perspective leaves out something crucial: how we all are influenced by the collectives we belong to and how, in turn, collectives are influenced by individuals. Shared responsibility as members of collective agents can be our key responsibility when it comes to climate change (depending on our circumstances and characteristics). In addition to shared responsibility as members, there are two other possible sources of moral responsibility for individuals in relation to climate change harms: shared responsibility as constituents of unorganised collectives and direct responsibility as super-polluters. This chapter explains the urgency of the climate threat and the structural nature of the problem, as well as what collective agency is. It also elaborates on the concept of responsibility that the book is concerned with.

There are two sides to carbon inequality: the inequality of citizens in a state (inequality within country) and global inequality of citizens of different countries (inequality between countries). The trend that intercuts the two sides is what I will call the global inequality of personal carbon footprints. This is an important issue that does not get enough attention in climate ethics. Throughout the previous chapters, I have argued that collective and shared responsibility for climate change is conceptually prior to direct individual responsibility. While this holds for almost everyone, there is a relatively small group of individuals who forms a possible exception to this rule. I will call these people super-polluters, as their lifestyles result in emissions many times over the carrying capacity of the Earth. When it comes to climate harms, individual direct responsibility is limited to very wealthy individuals with high emissions. People with very high personal carbon footprints, regardless of where they live, have direct personal responsibility regarding taking meaningful climate action. This individual direct responsibility is to not increase the probable risk of serious harm—the deprivation of fundamental capabilities—to others, as long as they can do so at a less than significant cost to themselves. I will also argue that offsetting is not a reliable way to meet it. Instead, what should take focus are mega-polluting consumption and the investment choices of the super-polluters.

If climate change is to be mitigated to a level that human societies could still adapt to, organised collectives across the board need to make changes to how they operate. We need regulation, but we also need action from corporations, local governments, cities, business associations, and other collective agents. Fossil fuels are embedded in our everyday practices of consumption and production, as energy sources and petrochemicals, which makes climate change too complex a problem to be resolved exclusively top-down. Collective agents of all stripes can innovate and deliver the meaningful structural-level changes required to address climate change. I suggest that collective agents should make their operations as carbon neutral as possible, as well as play their part in achieving a carbon-neutral world by 2050, cooperating with other agents as required to try to achieve systemic changes. I also discuss global vested and interlocking interests in the survival of the fossil fuel industry, including the highly intertwined nature of many states and fossil fuel corporations, and how fossil fuel majors have worked to replace concerns over corporate responsibility with a narrative of individual responsibility. PR and advertising firms can be seen as enablers of the fossil fuel industry.

Climate policy is about values and not all value choices are subject to optimisation. We need to be alert whenever normative positions about values masquerade as neutral solutions. This chapter argues that ethical arguments have an important role in setting climate policy: they can highlight what values are at stake, inspire new horizons of thought, and help ground normative arguments in public deliberations. Ethical arguments can also inspire new horizons of thought. Self-interest, viewed by some as an alternative to ethics in climate policy, is insufficient to guide policymaking. There is no bypassing the messy political debates. Ethical questions are embedded in policy choices, and they always come into economic models used in decision-making. These value choices should be debated openly to get climate policy right. Instead of purely technical solutions or even eco-authoritarianism, what is needed is more genuine and inclusive democratic debate.

Unorganised collectives that are interesting in terms of moral responsibility are a set of individuals picked out by some normatively relevant fact. With the collective harm of climate change, this could be about things like one’s consuming habits, line of work, or the potential of the constituents to do something good together. What is common for unorganised collectives relevant for climate mitigation responsibility is that their activity is interdependent and based on shared values to some degree. Shared social orientation can help us to conceptualise our responsibility as constituents of unorganised collectives who help to shape each other’s actions and values, including through social norms. When a systemic issue becomes individualised, the structural aspects can get blurred or fade completely into the background, meaning that the overall picture is also lost in terms of responsibility. Awareness of our embeddedness in collective contexts helps us to make sense of our moral lives and responsibility in our interdependent world. I suggest we try to pay attention to the harmful structures that we are part of. More specifically, we should try to become aware of our social positions within these structures and be willing to take action to make changes for the better, should such an opportunity arise. When we become aware of our shared social orientations, change can happen even from unlikely sources.

How should we respond to the urgent need to mitigate climate change when collective solutions are for the most part still lacking or insufficient? Instead of focusing on individuals as voters or consumers, this chapter highlights responsibility qua members of organised collectives, such as companies and associations. We should not forget this causally potent and individually salient responsibility, as mediated responsibility might in many cases be our best chance of making an impact when it comes to climate change mitigation. I argued in the previous chapter that given the scale and urgency of climate change, all collective agents have a pro tanto reason to reduce their emissions. Climate change cannot be solved without collective entities stepping up to meet their responsibilities, and collective entities will not do so unless enough of their members push for it, or another collective entity makes them comply through legislation, for example. Not only an all-hands-on-deck approach, we thus also need action within various collective agents. Collective agents are not pre-destined machines, but micro-societies in which members can often make a difference. Members should assess their role within organised collectives to see if and where they can push the collective to adopt policies and procedures that reduce net carbon emissions to optimal levels or otherwise promote mitigation action. The chapter also discusses employee activism.

Moral theories struggle to explain why individuals should or should not contribute to a collective outcome when their contribution is too small to make an appreciable difference. This is problematic if most contributions that make up a normatively significant outcome share this feature. Although the literature on the problem has focused on momentary, token-choice situations, I argue that the central question should concern individual behaviour over time and contributions to certain types of outcomes. As most real-life cases involve collective outcomes that aggregate over time, the crucial question is not whether we contribute to harm (or fail to help) on a specific, one-time occasion. Rather, what matters more is whether we consistently make, or try to avoid, that type of contribution. I contend that in many cases, the correct unit of moral analysis is not the individual act but rather the coherence of a person’s moral life. Failing to act according to our values in collective settings compromises our coherence as moral agents. Attempting to sharply separate the individual and collective domains in moral matters can lead to numbness to shared problems and contribute to the creation of harmful social norms.

This book proposes that it is not only states and international bodies that have a responsibility to take action toward mitigating climate change. Other collective agents, such as corporations, need to also come onboard. Additionally, the book argues that climate change is not solely a problem for collective agents, but also for individuals, as they are members of collectives and groups of several kinds. Therefore, framing climate change responsibility exclusively from either the collective or the individual perspective leaves out something crucial: how we all are influenced by the collectives we belong to and how, in turn, collectives are influenced by individuals. The focus of the book is on areas of climate change responsibility that are often left out of the picture or get too little attention in climate ethics, such as carbon inequality within countries. But why should any theoretical arguments about normative issues matter when we have a real-life climate crisis on our hands? Säde Hormio argues that ethical arguments have an important role in setting climate policy: they can highlight what values are at stake and help ground normative arguments in public deliberations.

Universities are knowledge institutions. Compared to several other knowledge institutions (e.g. schools, government research organisations, think tanks), research universities have unusual, anarchic organisational features. We argue that such anarchic features are not a weakness. Rather, they reflect the special standing of research universities among knowledge institutions. We contend that the distributed, self-organising mode of knowledge production maintains a diversity of approaches, topics and solutions needed in frontier research, which involves generating relevant knowledge under uncertainty. Organisational disunity and inconsistencies should sometimes be protected by institutional structures and procedures in order for research universities to best serve their purpose as knowledge institutions. The quality control for the knowledge produced stems from knowledge fields, clusters of knowledge and research that exist beyond the confines of individual organisations. The diversity of epistemic contributions is therefore kept in check by the order imposed by the internal logic of science as a social practice. Our argument provides a new defence for the autonomy of research conducted at universities.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the ways in which the concept of collective responsibility is relevant to ongoing normative debates in social and political philosophy. Individual chapters address issues such as the relationship between collective obligations and collective responsibility, the kinds of groups which can be the subjects of collective responsibility and obligations, and the relationship between the obligations of groups and the obligations of individual members of those groups. The book also puts these concepts to work in a number of applied cases, including questions around corporate responsibility and responsibility of AI, or debates about the responsibilities of individuals in relationship to questions about state wrong-doing, or the obligations of allies of marginalised social groups. The guiding principle of the book is that by taking both the theoretical and the applied issues seriously, we can gain new insights into the structure of collective responsibility and its practical implications. In addition to drawing on technical contributions of social ontology, the book is interested in what our real-life practices reveal to us about collective responsibility. The further question is should some of our institutional practices be revised in light of the implicit ontological claims that they make. This book appeals to academics and students in philosophy, political theory and legal studies, especially graduates and postgraduates.

How should we make sense of praise and blame and other such reactions towards collective agents like governments, universities, or corporations? My argument is that collective agents do not have to qualify as moral agents for us to make sense of their responsibility. Collective agents can be appropriate targets for our moral feelings and judgements because they can maintain and express moral positions of their own. Moral agency requires being capable of recognizing moral considerations and reasons. It also necessitates the ability to react reflexively to moral matters, i.e., to take into account new moral concerns when they arise. While members of a collective agent are capable of this, the collective frames the thinking of the individual moral agents within it and affects their options in myriad ways. The moral positions thus formed and expressed belong to the collective. Crucially, unlike marginal moral agents, collective agents as moral actors can be held fully responsible for their acts and omissions.

The current humans are the first ones to recognise that action is required on climate change, but the urgency makes us also possibly the last generation to be able to act before major threats are aggravated. I applaud the general message of an urgent call for action in Shue’s book but find that the brushstrokes used for identifying those responsible are a little too broad. The reason for this is twofold. Firstly, it is questionable as to how many of us really know enough about the risks we are leaving future generations with. Secondly, discussion in terms of generations underplays the big differences between the responsibility of different groups of actors within them.

Climate change can be construed as a question of collective responsibility from two different viewpoints: climate change being inherently a collective problem, or collective entities bearing responsibility for climate change. When discussing collective responsibility for climate change, “collective” can thus refer to the problem of climate change itself, or to the entity causing the harm and/or bearing responsibility for it. The first viewpoint focuses on how climate change is a harm that has been caused collectively. Collective action problem refers to an aggregation of individual actions which together produce an outcome that is not intended at the level of an individual action. It cannot be solved by any one agent acting unilaterally. Instead, climate change action must be enacted and supported by numerous agents. The second way to conceptualize climate change as a question of collective responsibility focuses on the collective entities that bear responsibility for climate change. As a global problem, climate change is linked to the realm of international politics, where states, governments, and intergovernmental organizations are the main collective entities. Other important agential collectives in terms of climate responsibility are corporations, including carbon majors who have produced the bulk of emissions. Climate change has also been theorized as a structural injustice, which combines elements from both the viewpoints on what is collective about responsibility for climate change.

A group is lying when it makes a statement that it believes to be untrue but wants the addressee(s) to believe. But how can we distinguish statements that the group believes to be untrue from honest group statements based on mistaken beliefs or confusion within the group? I will suggest a narrative constraint for honest group statements, made up of two components. Narrative coherence requires that a new group statement should not conflict with group knowledge on the matter, or beliefs of relevant operative subgroups, unless a coherent rationale is given. Narrative intention looks at the process of gathering new evidence on the area of expertise of the group and requires that the group position behind the statement is formed in good faith. The narrative constraint will help to distinguish group lies from more innocent erroneous statements of group beliefs when there is an internal disagreement within the group, including in cases involving spokespersons.

Lectio praecursoria 16.12.2017: Väitöskirjani tarkastelee yksilövastuun ja kollektiivisen vastuun suhdetta ja kysyy, mitä voimme oppia niistä tarkastelemalla ilmastonmuutosta. Käsittelen ilmastonmuutosta esimerkkitapauksena systemaattisesta vahingosta, joka on syntynyt kollektiivisen toiminnan tahattomana sivuvaikutuksena. Tällaisten vahinkojen ja haittojen kohdalla kausaalinen yhteys yksittäisen toimijan ja lopputuloksen välillä on usein epäselvä tai mahdoton osoittaa tarkasti. Osallisuusvastuu on osallistumista, osallisuutta tai yhteyttä väärään tekoon tai kollektiivisesti aiheutettuun haittaan. Ilmastonmuutos ei ole ongelma vain kollektiivisille toimijoille, vaan myös yksilöille pääosin sen takia, että olemme erilaisten kollektiivien jäseniä ja osia. Esitän, että yksilöiden moraaliselle vastuulle ilmastonmuutoksesta on kolme mahdollista lähdettä: suora vastuu, osallisuusvastuu kollektiivisten toimijoiden jäseninä ja osallisuusvastuu järjestymättömien kollektiivien osana. Kukaan yksilö ei ole vastuussa ilmastonmuutoksesta sinänsä, mutta yksilö voi olla vastuussa esimerkiksi vakavan haitan riskin kasvattamisesta. Mitä siis voimme oppia yksilöiden ja kollektiivien vastuusta tarkastelemalla ilmastonmuutosta? Voimme nähdä, että yksilöiden ja kollektiivien vastuut kietoutuvat yhteen, ja että nykymaailmassa emme voi päästä pakottavien ja ajankohtaisten ongelmien ytimeen keskustelematta niistä yhdessä. Olemme yhä riippuvaisempia toisistamme ja etiikan teorioiden tulisi kuvastaa tätä tilannetta. Kirjoitus on käytännöllisen filosofian väitöskirjani lectio praecursoria, joka esitettiin Helsingin yliopistossa 16. joulukuuta 2017.

We attribute knowledge to institutions on a daily basis, saying things like "the government knew about the threat" or "the university did not act upon the knowledge it had about the harassment". Institutions can also attribute knowledge to themselves, like when Maybank Global Banking claims that it offers its customers "deep expertise and vast knowledge" of the Southeast Asia region, or when the United States Geological Survey states that it understands complex natural science phenomena like the probability of earthquakes occurring along a given fault line. This article aims to discover when we can correctly attribute knowledge to an institution. I find this an interesting question, especially because when something does go wrong, all too often the official line of response from institutions is that they were unaware of the situation: in other words, they did not have enough information at their disposal. I will argue that institutions have fewer excuses for being ignorant than individuals do, and that many admissions of institutional knowledge are too modest. I begin by discussing a real-life example of the latter, before turning my attention to the usually fragmented nature of institutional knowledge. I also discuss the robustness of this knowledge, offering a distinction between two types of institutional knowledge. I then discuss knowledge parameters and why institutions have fewer excuses for not knowing about something than individuals do. I round off the chapter by examining institutional knowledge on climate change.

Climate change policy decisions are inescapably intertwined with future generations. Even if all carbon dioxide emissions were to be stopped today, most aspects of climate change would persist for hundreds of years, thus inevitably raising questions of intergenerational justice and sustainability. The chapter begins with a short overview of discount rate debate in climate economics, followed by the observation that discounting implicitly makes the assumption that natural capital is always substitutable with man-made capital. The chapter explains why non-substitutability matters if we are to take intergenerational justice seriously and invest aptly in mitigation. Non-substitutability simply implies that there are some forms of capital that cannot be substituted by another, and so consumption of one cannot be compensated with additional stocks of the other. The non-substitutability of critical natural capital can be defended without empirical data about preferences or the need to view the environment as a superior good, and the argument is presented through the language of keeping options open. Those alive today make decisions about what natural capital to use and what to save for future. These choices are often represented as different points in a continuum of sustainability: weak sustainability is associated with a high degree of substitutability and therefore a lot of flexibility over what capital to consume, whereas strong sustainability is more stringent on substitutability. While it may be that in economical understanding weak and strong sustainability collapse into one another, philosophically the emphasis is slightly different. The chapter discusses how normative sustainability can be supported without ignoring opportunity costs and trade-offs.

Vaikka suurin osa viimeaikaisesta ilmaston lämpenemisestä on ihmisten aiheuttamaa antropogeenista lämpenemistä, yksittäisten ihmisten kausaalinen vaikutus ilmastonmuutokseen on minimaalinen, jopa mitätön. Tämän takia jotkut väittävät, että on harhaanjohtavaa pitää yksilöitä vastuussa ilmastonmuutoksesta. Tällainen argumentointi perustuu perinteisiin vastuutulkintoihin ja -käsitteisiin, joissa vastuun perustana painotetaan toimijan näkökulmaa ja hänen kausaalista rooliaan: jos toimijan teot tai tekemättä jättämiset eivät vaikuta lopputulokseen, hän ei ole vastuussa siitä. Ilmastonmuutoksessa on toinenkin vastuukäsitysten kannalta ongelmallinen seikka, intentionaalisuus eli tahallisuus: ihmiskunta tai yksittäiset ihmiset eivät ole tietoisesti lähteneet muuttamaan ilmastoa. Päinvastoin ilmastonmuutos on syntynyt teollistumisen ja nykyisen elämäntyylimme tahattomana – ja pitkään myös tiedostamattomana – sivuvaikutuksena. Koska omien tekojemme kausaalinen vaikutus sekä niiden tahallisuus tai tahattomuus on luonnollisesti keskiössä arvioidessamme omaa vastuutamme, mahdollinen osallisuutemme vahingon tuottamiseen jää helposti vähemmälle huomiolle. Keskityn tässä artikkelissa osallisuusvastuun (complicity) käsitteeseen ja argumentoin samalla liian yksilökeskeistä ajattelua vastaan. Kollektiivinen toimijuus on otettava huomioon siinä missä yksilökeskeinenkin. Vastuunkantaja ja vastuun peruste ovat analyyttisesti erillisiä käsitteitä, ja niiden tarkastelu voi valottaa vastuukeskustelua ilmastonmuutoksesta. Vastuun peruste voi olla yksilöllinen silloinkin, kun vastuunkantaja on kollektiivinen. Lisäksi argumentoin, että vastuusta puhuttaessa ei riitä katsoa asiaa vain toimijan itsensä kannalta, vaan myös uhrin ja sivustakatsojan näkökulmat on otettava huomioon. Vasta kun vastuukäytäntöjä tarkastellaan ihmisten keskinäisten (usein monimutkaisten) verkostojen ja linkitysten kautta, voidaan saada tasapainoinen kuva vastuumme määrästä ja sen rajoista. Yksilön vastuu ei poista vastuuta kollektiiveilta, kuten valtioilta, ja voimme tehokkaimmin hillitä ilmastonmuutosta esimerkiksi lainsäädännön kautta. Ennen kuin kollektiiviset ratkaisut ilmastonmuutoksen hillitsemiseksi saadaan toimimaan, vastuu palautuu kuitenkin yksilöille. Vastuun peruste on aina yksilötasolla ja sitä voidaan ainoastaan delegoida kollektiiveille. Ilmastonmuutoksen kohdalla delegointi ei ole vielä toiminut.

This paper explores types of organisational ignorance and ways in which organisational practices can affect the knowledge we have about the causes and effects of our actions. I will argue that because knowledge and information are not evenly distributed within an organisation, sometimes organisational design alone can create individual ignorance. I will also show that sometimes the act that creates conditions for culpable ignorance takes place at the collective level. This suggests that quality of will of an agent is not necessary to explain culpable ignorance in an organisational setting.

The topic of my thesis is individual and collective responsibility for collectively caused systemic harms, with climate change as the case study. Can an individual be responsible for these harms, and if so, how? Furthermore, what does it mean to say that a collective is responsible? A related question, and the second main theme, is how ignorance and knowledge affect our responsibility. My aim is to show that despite the various complexities involved, an individual can have responsibility to address climate change. I argue that climate change is not a problem just for states and international bodies, but also for individuals. There are three possible sources of moral responsibility for individuals in relation to climate change harms: direct responsibility (individuals qua individuals), shared responsibility as members (individuals qua members of collective agents), and shared responsibility as constituents (individuals qua constituents of unorganised collectives). Accounts that deny individual responsibility fail to either take our interdependent reality seriously or fail to understand marginal participation (or in the case direct responsibility, fail to appreciate the nature of the climate change phenomenon). Individuals can be complicit in climate change harms, either as members of collective agents (e.g. as citizens of states or employees of a corporation) or as constituents of unorganised collectives (e.g. as consumers or polluters). Although I focus on individual complicity, I do not deny the obligations of collective agents. However, nation-states, governments, and international bodies are not the only relevant collective agents in climate ethics: other collective agents, such as corporations, matter also and can have obligations concerning making sure that their activities are as carbon-neutral as possible. In addition, those corporations that have engaged in lobbying against climate regulation through creating and disseminating misleading information have acquired themselves additional obligations to mitigate climate change and compensate for the harm they have caused. Even so, the ethical claims can only be understood by individual members of these collective agents because only they can feel the pull of moral claims. I suggest that we could distinguish between what one must possess in order to be capable of making moral claims (i.e. moral agency conditions), and what it means to have the ability to exhibit such claims through one’s conduct. Individual direct responsibility is to not to increase the probable risk of serious harm to other people, at least as long as we can do so at a less than significant cost to ourselves. It is limited to relatively wealthy individuals. Offsetting is not a reliable way to meet this duty; we need to look at the emissions from our lifestyle choices (within the available infrastructure). Shared responsibility qua members of collective agents is the key individual responsibility, and it presses especially on those occupying key positions within key collective agents. Saying that, our shared responsibility qua constituents of unorganised collectives has the potential to be decisive in whether some action is taken or not, either through a set of actions that can signal certain acceptance or support, or as a form of political support from the grass roots.

Climate change is one of the most crucial problems facing the global community at the present time. Climate change will affect not only the well-being of future generations but the prospects of those who are currently alive. At the time of writing this introduction, news outlets across the world were reporting that global temperatures for February of this year showed an unprecedented upward spike.' According to NASA data, it was 1.35°C warmer than the average February during the baseline period of 1950-1981. Even more disturbingly, this is the biggest temperature anomaly since records began in 1880. At the same time, Arctic sea-ice cover recorded its lowest ever February value. Many commentators in those reports spoke understandably of a climate emergency at our very doorstep. These alarming statistics illustrate the rapid changes occurring across the globe and demonstrate the urgency of the climate challenges that confront us. In responding to climate change and in formulating climate policy, economic analysis and economic solutions will undoubtedly be two of the key tools employed by policymakers. They will be central to the solutions that governments and other relevant institutional agencies develop to the challenge of climate change. Indeed climate economics has been at the heart of much of the recent policy debate.

This book was born out of two interdisciplinary seminars held in 2014. The first one was the Climate Ethics and Climate Economics workshop in April adjoined as part of the European Consortium for Political Research Joint Sessions 2014 in Salamanca. Spurred on by the invigorating discussions, the participants decided to put together more workshops, with Ethical Underpinnings of Climate Economics following in Helsinki in November that same year. Without the organisers of these workshops the collaborators of this book would not have come together: Matthew Rendall, Dominic Roser, Sade Hormio, Simo Kyllonen, Aaron Maltais and Joanna Burch-Brown. We would also like to thank all the participants at the workshops for making them so enjoyable and worthwhile. The Helsinki workshop that this book was named after was organized as part of the Climate Ethics and Economics project, led by Aki Lehtinen and funded by the University of Helsinki. The three-year project is based at the Social and Moral Philosophy discipline in the Department of Political and Economic Studies. The workshop itself was made possible by funding from the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, which also helped to host the event.