Stijn Neuteleers

The provision of environmental goods has inevitably distributive implications because some will use or value environmental goods more than others. Most egalitarian theories of distributive justice, have been focused on the redistribution of privately-held goods and leave the redistributive impact of public goods, such as environmental goods, aside. One exception to this public goods gap in theories of justice is David Miller. According to Miller we need to measure the redistributive impact of public goods and develop a tax scheme which maximizes ‘equalizing of net gains’. Miller’s account has not been undisputed. According to Humprey, Miller ignores the irreplaceability of environmental goods. According to Hannis, Miller fails to make a distinction between wants and ideals. I will argue that Miller’s position can be maintained against these two criticisms. It will be, nevertheless, argued that there are fundamental desirability and feasibility problems with Miller’s approach in that it relies on economic valuation. A one-dimensional measure such as economic valuation is not suitable to deal with the incommensurable aspect of environmental goods. Dealing with incommensurability requires a more deliberative approach. Moreover, Miller’s approach reduces public goods to a matter of efficiency and distribution and leaves no room for value-based public goods.

Some recent policy-oriented publications have put forward a third category of environmental values, namely relational or eudaimonic values, in addition to intrinsic and instrumental values. In this debate, there is, however, much confusion about the content of such values. This paper looks at a fundamental debate in ethics about a third category of reasons besides reasons from morality and self-interest, labelled as reasons of love, care or meaningfulness. This category allows us, first, to see the relation between relational and eudaimonic values, and, second, to make clear and applicable distinctions between the relational valuing of nature and moral or instrumental valuing.

This article start from two opposing intuitions in the environmental duties debate. On the one hand, if our lifestyle causes environmental harm, then we have a duty to reduce that impact through lifestyle changes. On the other hand, many people share the intuition that environmental duties cannot demand to alter our lifestyle radically for environmental reasons. These two intuitions underlie the current dualism in the environmental duties debate: those arguing for lifestyle changes and those arguing that our duties are limited to promoting just environmental institutions. The paper has two goals: first, to grasp the underlying reasons for the two intuitions, and, second, to provide a proposal that integrates both intuitions. The paper consists of two main parts. The first part examines the ‘our-duties-should-be-limited’ intuition. Two interpretations are discussed, one under the title ‘what I do make no difference’, dealing with causality and collective action, and one under the title ‘my duty cannot be to change my lifestyle completely’, which discusses demandingness, fairness and value conflict. The second part shows how the ‘lifestyle-matters’ intuition can still play an important role. This part consists of two sections, one on ‘how to make a difference’, which deals with the idea of a cooperative ethos, and the other with ‘why lifestyle matters’, discussing expressive rationality and integrity. These ideas allow giving an important place to lifestyle duties, while avoiding the possible counterproductive effect of a private duties account.

While Baatz provides an interesting account of individual climate duties, his account does not give much guidance with regard to particular acts, such as taking a flight. While everyone in the debate agrees that institution-oriented duties are important, the relevant question concerns the relation these have with lifestyle-oriented duties. In this comment, it is argued that the relation between institutions and duties is insufficiently examined and that Baatz therefore cannot deal with the following questions. First, what about the conflict between institution-oriented and lifestyle-oriented duties and what kind of actions do both types include? Second, Baatz includes the criterion ‘no moral weight’ in the answer to what can be reasonable demanded, but what will count as morally weighty? This comment will look at these questions by contrasting Baatz’ account with a more Rawlsian one.

This article examines the argument that biodiversity is crucial for well-functioning ecosystems and that such ecosystems provide important goods and services to our human societies, in short the ecosystem services argument (ESA). While the ESA can be a powerful argument for nature preservation, we argue that its dominant functionalist interpretation is confronted with three significant problems. First, the ESA seems unable to preserve the nature it claims to preserve. Second, the ESA cannot explain why those caring about nature want to preserve it. Third, the ESA might undermine its own goal because it potentially decreases environmental motivations.

The underlying idea of the notion ‘environmental refugee’ is simple: environmental problems make certain regions less fit for human habitation and people are therefore forced to migrate. However, much of the debate on environmental refugees is polarised. It is argued that this polarisation follows from two different perspectives. The first points to the responsibility of industrial countries with regard to their contribution to environmental problems. The second is interested in policies towards particular refugees. With regard to the latter perspective, there are two fundamental problems with the notion ‘environmental refugee’: the environmental cause cannot be easily disentangled from other causal factors and the idea of environmental cause covers too many substantially different subgroups. These problems can be met by a more refined classification. The debate is focused for the most part on one category, namely ‘deterioration refugees’. The main problem of this group is that they cannot be distinguished from the broader group of economic migrants. However, there is a subgroup of deterioration refugees in which the environmental cause can be separated from other causes, thus reinforcing this group’s claim to be helped