Climate Change and Individual Responsibility

Wouter Peeters is a researcher at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. His research focuses on the challenges to our conceptions of freedoms and responsibilities that are posed by climate change and environmental sustainability. Andries De Smet is Junior Research Fellow of the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders at Ghent University. His research interests include cosmopolitanism and questions of responsibility regarding climate change and global justice. Lisa Diependaele is a researcher at Ghent University, Belgium. She studies global ethics in international economic governance. Sigrid Sterckx is Professor of Ethics and Political Philosophy at Ghent University, Belgium. Her current research focuses on: climate ethics and governance; medical decisions at the end of life; human tissue research; organ transplantation; neuroethics; and patent law. She has authored and co-authored more than 100 books, book chapters and journal articles on these topics and serves on various advisory boards and commissions, including the Belgian Advisory Committee on Bioethics.

• 1. Introduction 1.1. Is Someone Responsible? 1.2. Overview 2. Climate Change, Human Rights and Moral Responsibility 2.1. Human Rights Threatened by Climate Change 2.2. Assigning Remedial Responsibility for Tackling Climate Change 2.3. Individual Responsibility and Moral Agency 3. The Phenomenology of Agency in Climate Change 3.1. First Feature: the Primacy of Acts Over Omissions 3.2. Second Feature: the Primacy of Near Effects Over Remote Effects 3.3. Third Feature: the Primacy of Individual Effects Over Group Effects 4. Understanding the Motivational Gap 4.1. The Origins of Common-sense Morality and the Theoretical Storm 4.2. Competing Motives Influenced by the Dominant Social Paradigm 4.3. The Role of the Restrictive Conception of Individual Responsibility and Moral Disengagement 5. Addressing the Motivational Gap and Tackling Moral Disengagement 5.1. Increasing Moral Motivation 5.2. Addressing the Underlying Reasons for Moral Disengagement 5.3. Tackling the Propensity for Moral Disengagement 6. Conclusion

'The mysteries of motivation that have bamboozled many students of climate change are confronted head-on in this ground-breaking and valuable exploration of the psychological mechanisms of moral disengagement that underlie our mystifying inaction in the face of the growing dangers. The authors thoroughly demonstrate how deeply misleading our conventional phenomenology of moral agency is as ordinarily applied to climate change and suggest positive strategies for tackling moral disengagement while time remains.' - Henry Shue, University of Oxford, UK'Is anyone responsible for climate change? Slippery politicians and clever philosophers often argue that no one is. This book takes on the arguments and finds them wanting. A timely, engaging and insightful contribution to a vital debate.' - Stephen M. Gardiner, University of Washington, Seattle, USA.'Climate change jeopardizes people's enjoyment of fundamental human rights. It is imperative, then, to be able to identify who is responsible for avoiding dangerous climatic changes and to understand why people are not motivated to take action. This valuable and welcome book provides an illuminating defence of the role of individual responsibility, and a powerful and sustained response to those who think that such an account cannot cope with problems like climate change.' - Simon Caney, University of Oxford, UK"Climate ethicists typically assert individual responsibility for climate-related harm without acknowledging the pervasive moral disengagement by which many deny personal complicity in predicted impacts, exaggerate uncertainties, or otherwise minimize its moral significance. This important book develops an innovative phenomenology of agency through which such responsibility becomes philosophically plausible, providing a more robust defense of and motivation for its imperatives." - Steve Vanderheiden, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA