Steve Vanderheiden

The Obligation to Know: Information and the Burdens of Citizenship

Anonymous — Wed, 19 Apr 2017 22:37:04 +0000

The Obligation to Know: Information and the Burdens of Citizenship Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/19/2017 - 16:37

Vanderheiden S. ETHICAL THEORY AND MORAL PRACTICE. 19 (2) (April 01, 2016): 297-311.

Abstract:
Contemporary persons are daily confronted with enormous quantities of information, some of which reveal causal connections between their actions and harm that is visited upon distant others. Given their limited cognitive and information processing capacities, persons cannot reasonably be expected to respond to every cry for help or call to action, but neither can they defensibly refuse to hear and reflect upon any of them. Persons have a limited obligation to know, I argue, which requires that they inform themselves and others about their role in harmful social practices, with a view toward challenging the norms that sustain such practices. In this paper, I explore this obligation to know, and the related idea of excusable ignorance, offering accounts of the epistemic burden that it entails for persons in their capacities as citizens and in the context of global climate change and of reproach as a potentially effective tool for rectifying rather than excusing ignorance.

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Territorial Rights and Carbon Sinks

Anonymous — Wed, 19 Apr 2017 22:35:38 +0000

Territorial Rights and Carbon Sinks Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/19/2017 - 16:35

Vanderheiden S. Sci Eng Ethics (November 29, 2016).

Abstract:
Scholars concerned with abuses of the ‘‘resource privilege’’ by the governments of developing states sometimes call for national sovereignty over the natural resources that lie within its borders. While such claims may resist a key driver of the ‘‘resource curse’’ when applied to mineral resources in the ground, and are often recognized as among a people’s territorial rights, their implications differ in the context of climate change, where they are invoked on behalf of a right to extract and combust fossil fuels that is set in opposition to global climate change mitigation imperatives. Moreover, granting full national sovereignty over territorial carbon sinks may conflict with commitments to equity in the sharing of national mitigation burdens, since much of the planet’s carbon sink capacity lies within territorial borders to which peoples have widely disparate access. In this paper, I shall explore this tension between a global justice principle that is often applied to mineral resources and its tension with contrary principles that are often applied to carbon sink access, developing an analysis that seeks to reconcile what would otherwise appear to be fundamentally incompatible aims.

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Climate Justice Beyond International Burden Sharing.

Anonymous — Wed, 19 Apr 2017 22:34:17 +0000

Climate Justice Beyond International Burden Sharing. Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/19/2017 - 16:34

Vanderheiden S. Midwest Studies In Philosophy. 40 (1) (September 2016): 27-42.

Abstract:
Climate justice scholars have in recent years devoted considerable attention to the development and application of justice principles and frameworks to the architecture of global climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts. The resulting scholarly literature is now rife with burden-sharing or resource-sharing mitigation prescriptions that call for far more aggressive actions than are ever considered as viable policy options, along with proposals for singular or hybrid principles for assigning adaptation liability that follow sound normative analyses but have gained little traction among policymakers (Gardiner 2013; Harris 2016; Moellendorf 2014; Vanderheiden 2007). With their gaze fixed primarily upon macro-level substantive policy outcomes, scholars have paid less attention to the way that justice might be applied at other levels of analysis and operationalized through the institutions of international climate policy development and implementation.

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Climate Change and Free Riding.

Anonymous — Wed, 19 Apr 2017 22:32:01 +0000

Climate Change and Free Riding. Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/19/2017 - 16:32

Vanderheiden S. JOURNAL OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY. 13 (1) (January 01, 2016): 1-27.

Abstract:
Does the receipt of benefits from some common resource create an obligation to contribute toward its maintenance? If so, what is the basis of this obligation? I consider whether individual contributions to climate change can be impugned as wrongful free riding upon the stability of the planet's climate system, when persons enjoy its benefits but refuse to bear their share of its maintenance costs. Two main arguments will be advanced: the first urges further modification of H.L.A. Hart’s “principle of fairness” as the basis for demanding that would-be free riders pay their fair share in the context of climate change, while the second claims that remedial action on climate change is better captured through collective action analysis than through harm principles that seek to connect individual actions to bad environmental outcomes.

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Justice and Democracy in Climate Change Governance.

Anonymous — Wed, 19 Apr 2017 22:29:40 +0000

Justice and Democracy in Climate Change Governance. Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/19/2017 - 16:29

VANDERHEIDEN SJ. Taiwan Human Rights Journal. 3 (3) (2016): 3-26.

Abstract:
Among the challenges posed by human-caused climate change are issues of justice and democracy, in how the environmental problem is expected to affect human social and economic systems and in the response taken by states and the international community to mitigate the problem. While unmitigated climate change unjustly harms the most vulnerable and widens existing unjust inequalities, programs to mitigate climate change can also be just or unjust, and so must take pains to avoid the latter. Likewise with democracy, as the failure to adequately respond to climate change may intensify scarcity and in so doing undermine new or established democracies, and cooperative efforts to control climate change are likely to be more responsive to the interests of the many if they are informed by democratic ideals and principles. Both sets of issues can constructively be theorized in terms of human rights, which seek to guarantee human interests in a safe and sustainable environment as well as those to self-determination and popular participation in major decisions that shape social and economic life, and which help to link the demands of justice and democracy in common cause. Here, I shall examine several such issues of justice and democracy, in the contexts of both domestic and international climate change governance, grounding these imperatives where appropriate in a human rights framework.

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