Overview Climate change and individual duties Augustin Fragnière* Edited by Anja Karnein, Domain Editor, and Mike Hulme, Editor-in-Chief Tackling climate change has often been considered the responsibility of national governments. But do individuals also have a duty to act in the face of this problem? In particular, do they have a duty to adopt a greener lifestyle or to press their government to act? This review critically examines the arguments provided for and against such duties in the relevant philosophic literature. It first discusses the problem of causal inefficacy—namely the fact that individual greenhouse gas emissions appear to make no difference to the harmful consequences of climate change—and whether it clears individuals from any moral obligations related to climate change. Then, it considers various other arguments for the existence of such duties, including integrity, fairness, universalizability, or virtue. Finally, it assesses the existence of a duty to promote collective action through active citizenship. The conclusion emphasizes that most writers agree on the fact that individuals have at least some duties to take action against climate change, but that disagreement remains about the exact nature and, above all, the extent of these duties. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. How to cite this article: WIREs Clim Change 2016. doi: 10.1002/wcc.422 INTRODUCTION F or more than two decades, climate change has been recognized as a global threat raising issues of justice between peoples. Climate ethics, as a new investigation field for practical philosophy, emerged in the 1990s in the wake of the international negotiations for a global climate treaty (the UNFCCC). In particular, this has given rise to a vast philosophical literature on the fairest way to share the costs and benefits of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.1 This debate is closely related to global and intergenerational justice issues and may be referred to as distributive climate justice.2 More recently, a somewhat different (but not completely separate) line of reflection has emerged about the responsibilities and duties *Correspondence to: afragne@gmail.com Department of Philosophy, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA Conflict of interest: The author has declared no conflicts of interest for this article. of individuals in the face of climate change. This debate does not focus directly on distributive issues on a large scale, but usually uses arguments and principles specific to applied ethics, and sometimes political philosophy, aiming at governing our everyday actions. I propose to refer to this line of reflection as individual climate ethics. So far, this debate has been mainly focused on what morality requires from individuals in the absence of a collective global agreement on emission reductions and in the absence of incentivizing or coercive abatement schemes at the state level. This will be my main focus here. The starting point of the current debate is the following thought. Climate change, despite its huge potential for harm, is a collective action problem brought about by billions of tiny contributions. The puzzle here is that nobody appears to be responsible for it, since nobody’s emissions, taken individually, are either necessary or sufficient to cause climate change. Individual emissions and individual efforts to curb them are so minute compared to the global anthropogenic impact on the climate system that they © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Overview wires.wiley.com/climatechange can be deemed negligible and, according to some authors, fail to justify an individual duty to reduce one’s carbon footprint.3–9 You can personally try to have a lifestyle as climate-friendly as possible, the argument goes, but this will make no difference to the magnitude of climate change. This is so because enough other people will continue to behave in a climate unfriendly manner anyway. No matter how green your lifestyle is, your personal contribution is nothing but a drop in the ocean. In the face of this observation, and considering that adopting a green lifestyle also involves certain costs, what does morality demand of us? What kind of responsibilities and duties can we attribute to individuals and on the basis of which ethical principles? This problem is not totally new in the philosophical landscape, insofar as it concerns most situations where a great number of uncoordinated actions lead to significant benefits or harms, from voting to shopping to the consumption of meat. However, climate change is a textbook example of such accumulative harms and has largely contributed to reinvigorate the debate. My aim here is to review the main positions and arguments that have emerged in the last decade, specifically about the issue of climate change. RESPONSIBILITY AND DUTY In ethics, the concept of duty usually refers to a moral obligation to perform a given act or set of acts. The definition of responsibility, however, is a little bit murkier as the term can have different senses. On a backward-looking sense, to be responsible means that one can aptly be held blameworthy or liable for a given state of affairs (e.g., the driver is responsible for the accident). On a forward-looking sense, it is akin to the concept of duty. Responsibility in this sense is about what a person ought to do, even though the actions required to achieve it are not always specified (e.g., parents are responsible for their children’s safety). In the case of individual climate ethics, the debate covers both concepts of backward-looking responsibility and duty. Some writers try to figure out whether individuals can be held responsible for the damages resulting from past and current GHG emissions, whereas others ask whether individuals have a duty to refrain from emitting GHG. It is worth emphasizing that the two debates sometimes offer similar arguments. This is the case because if it is true that we can be held responsible for the harm caused by our current emissions, it is plausible to argue that we also have a duty to refrain from causing it. Duty and backward-looking responsibility are often (but not necessarily always) closely related. Hence, even though my focus will be on individual duties, I will also refer to arguments from the backward-looking responsibility debate when this is relevant. Many different kinds of climate duties have been mentioned in the specialized literature, but I will limit myself to two of them: the duty to reduce one’s carbon footprint and the duty to promote and support collective action against climate change. The former has taken the lion’s share of the discussion so far and the latter is currently gaining more philosophical attention. Both can be called mitigation duties, insofar as they are directed toward reducing the very causes of climate change. Other possible kinds of duties such as enabling adaptation, giving money to climate projects, compensating the victims of climate change or helping them directly have received little attention qua individual duties (as opposed to institutional arrangements), and will therefore be left aside.a The Duty to Reduce One’s Carbon Footprint As early as 1992, Dale Jamieson famously wrote: ‘Today we face the possibility that the global environment may be destroyed, yet no one will be responsible.’11 The underlying idea behind this startling quote is that our current value system (sometimes referred to as ‘common sense morality’) evolved in small communities where relations of proximity were the norm, and is adapted to deal with paradigm moral problems such as cases where an individual directly harms another individual. Yet, climate change, as a large-scale intergenerational collective action problem, falls short of being such a paradigm moral problem.b According to Jamieson, responding properly to the challenge would thus require a substantial revision of common sense morality.9,11–14c The present debate can be viewed as an investigation of this claim across contemporary ethical theories. For instance, more than ten years ago, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong made the provocative statement that there is no such thing as an individual duty to reduce one’s GHG emissions. He takes the example of a joyride in a gas-guzzling SUV on a Sunday afternoon, and argues that there is no obvious principle in contemporary moral theory that condemns it as morally wrong. In particular, even though the ride unnecessarily emits a relatively important amount of carbon dioxide, it does not cause harm in the relevant sense.4d Jamieson approves of this in his latest book,9 and for both © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. WIREs Climate Change Climate change and individual duties writers the crux is that individual contributions make (or appear to make) no difference to the harm brought about. This has been dubbed the problem of inconsequentialism or causal inefficacy.5,11,18,19e In what follows, I delineate four different reasons why individual contributions might be judged causally inefficacious and present the main counterarguments we find in the specialized literature. Then, I review other arguments in favor of a duty to reduce one’s carbon footprint that try to bypass the problem of inefficacy. The Problem of Causal Inefficacy The four main reasons why individual emissions might be causally inefficacious are: (1) my emissions are too small to be significant; (2) due to climatic thresholds, my emissions cause no marginal harm; (3) there is no direct causal pathway between particular emissions and climate-related harms; and (4) the same amount of GHG will be emitted anyway. Let us take them in turn. Insignificance/Imperceptibility: My Emissions Are Too Small Individual contributions to the anthropogenic greenhouse effect are extremely minute compared to the global GHG emissions. An average American emits 17 metric tons of CO2 each year, which represents approximately one two-billionth of the global annual emissions.f Thus, compared with the total amount of carbon dioxide emitted over many years, the emissions resulting from discrete actions are even more infinitesimal. From that point of view, driving for fun or even flying for leisure appear very much to be like pouring a glass of water into a flooding river.4 Particular emissions of CO2 will quite obviously make no difference to the amount of harm brought about by climate change, just like the glass of water with respect to the flood. In one word, the consequences of one particular GHG emitting act appear morally insignificant. Against this line of argument, the first step is generally to invalidate the idea that individual contributions have no effect at all like the flood example suggests. Indeed, if every tiny contribution made no difference, climate change would not occur.g We can reconcile our intuition that everyday actions have no bearing at the global scale with the fact that climate change is actually happening by acknowledging that imperceptible does not mean nonexistent.6,18,24–26 Albeit very tiny, probably beyond the scope of human understanding, individual emissions (or at least some of them) have a very real impact on the global climate. However, the simple fact that our actions do have a very minute impact on the global climate does not mean that we ought to take them into account when we ponder what to do. Taking into account every single effect of our daily actions would certainly make our lives impossible. Thus, to count as harms in the relevant sense, that is to be deemed morally significant, the consequences of our actions must be more than trivial.27 But one can doubt that the effects of our personal GHG emissions are so. After all, no one’s life will be meaningfully different as a result of the carbon dioxide emitted by an SUV ride; the difference it makes to the greenhouse effect is too infinitesimal. If this is true, it leads us to what can be called a ‘paradox of small effects,’ that is the fact that a set of morally insignificant actions can bring about morally significant harm.28,29 To find a way out of this apparent paradox, many authors follow the famous British philosopher Derek Parfit.16,18,28,30–34 Parfit points out that the conditions of globalization and interconnectedness that we experience today change the way we have to think about the consequences of our actions.26 He defines five so-called ‘mistakes in moral mathematics’ that we are prone to make given our new ability to affect others in various ways. At least two of these mistakes are relevant to climate change, the first one being that of ‘ignoring the effects of sets of acts.’ Indeed, in the case of GHG emissions we know that a great many other people are also emitting GHGs and that the accumulation of all these tiny contributions causes great harm. This must be taken into account and it would be a mistake, Parfit argues, to consider only the consequences of our acts in isolation.26 The second relevant mistake is that of ‘ignoring small or imperceptible effects’ when they affect a large number of persons. To understand this it might be worth noting that if my Sunday afternoon joyride has the effect of raising the global mean temperature of one billionth of a degree, this will affect very slightly not just one person but all the persons subjected to these new conditions. For Parfit, this is clearly morally wrong because causing very small harms to a lot of people can be morally as bad as causing a substantial harm to one person. However, even though Parfit gives various example to make his claims more plausible, at least some climate ethicists do not share his intuition.6,7,9,35 Another popular strategy around the puzzle of insignificant consequences is to challenge the empirical claim that individual emissions cause nothing but indiscernibly small effects. Some authors appeal to the ‘butterfly effect,’ that is the idea that very small changes in the meteorological system can be amplified and bring about dramatic weather events.33 Others choose a more straightforward strategy and © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Overview wires.wiley.com/climatechange try to calculate the amount of harm the lifetime emissions of an average American are responsible for. John Nolt estimates that it amounts to the serious suffering and/or death of two persons over the next millennium,h which shows that the effect of individual emissions is all but negligible.37 This is so because even though the average American’s share of the total is very small (one two-billionth), the consequences of climate change are so huge that the harm attributed to him is substantial. Similarly, John Broome finds that the lifetime emissions of a westerner will cause the loss of six months of healthy human life or will cost between $19,000 and $65,000.38 Avram Hiller estimates that a Sunday drive is the moral equivalent of ‘ruining someone’s afternoon,’ which he considers not negligible.39 These figures are rough estimates and there is an on-going debate about the relevance of such calculations. For instance, some authors argue that what counts in assessing the consequences of individual actions is not the share of the total harm but the marginal effect, that is the difference between two scenarios with and without the given emissions.6,33,40 Other writers have pointed out that being responsible for one two-billionth of four billion deaths is not the same as being responsible for two deaths,35 or that specific deaths are not the same as statistical deaths.41 In any case, the debate is far from settled, but these calculations indicate at least that we should not be too quick to take the argument from insignificance for granted. If the math is correct, and if it turns out that it has moral force, it follows that we have a strong prima facie duty not to emit GHGs. Climatic Thresholds: My Emissions Cause No Marginal Harm But, even if our daily emissions cannot be deemed negligible, maybe our everyday actions make no difference for other reasons. Climatic thresholds might play a role as well. Consider a first one that I will call initial threshold. Because of the uptake of carbon dioxide by natural sinks (biomass and oceans), the greenhouse effect is not reinforced until we emit enough CO2 to overwhelm their absorptive capacity. This critical amount currently represents around 60% of the global emissions, which corresponds to 23 billion tons of CO2 of the 38 billion humanity emits each year.42 This means that the first 23 billion tons of carbon dioxide we emit each year do not raise the GHG concentration in the atmosphere— they are below the initial threshold—but also that we overshoot this initial threshold by 15 billion tons of CO2. To begin with, individuals (as well as firms or nations) might be tempted to say that their personal emissions are below this initial threshold and therefore make no difference to climate change. But this argument is unacceptable because they emit in the context of an already too large amount of global GHG emissions, and this fact cannot be brushed aside.30,43 Furthermore, scientists have made it clear that the goal is to reach zero CO2 emissions (and not just to cut them by 40%) by the end of the century.42 Now, do emissions taking place beyond the initial threshold make a difference? Philosophers call cases where there are more causal factors than necessary for a consequence to unfold, instances of overdetermination. A typical example is that of a firing squad consisting of five soldiers. Insofar as one bullet is sufficient to cause the death of the prisoner, the four others are in excess. They make no marginal difference to the amount of harm brought about, because the man is already dead. In other words, these contributions are not necessary. Some authors argue that the case of climate change is analogous to this one.4,6,8,9,44,45 Given the size of the overshoot and the fact that large amounts of GHG are emitted at the same time from different sources, it is tempting to say that individual emissions make no difference because climate change will happen anyway (as the death would happen anyway even if one soldier refrained from shooting). For instance, Dale Jamieson writes: ‘climate change will occur whether or not I needless drive or thoughtlessly jet.’9 Even though there is quite a lot of philosophical debate about the moral status of such overdetermination cases,16,26,28,45,46 the most straightforward answer here is probably empirical. Climate change is actually not a case of overdetermination. Unlike the firing squad example where the harm cannot exceed one death, climate change is best characterized as a broadly incremental phenomenon interspersed by various nonlinear features20,42 or, alternatively, as a succession of interrelated micro thresholds.30,46 Once the (supposedly) decisive amount of 23 billion tons of CO2 has been released into the atmosphere, each supplemental amount of GHG makes the problem worse (or helps trigger the next threshold, see below). In other words, they do cause marginal harm. Saying that the difference is too tiny to be relevant would only send us back to the arguments about insignificance and imperceptibility. However, some authors make the somewhat controversial assumption that beyond the initial threshold, the harm brought about by climate change comes only in discreet thresholds (call these ones critical thresholds).i For instance, past a certain concentration of GHGs some additional weather events such as droughts, heat waves, or hurricanes may kick © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. WIREs Climate Change Climate change and individual duties in or some devastating climate tipping point might be reached. According to this interpretation, even if your joyride is a net addition to the amount of GHG emitted, it is not sure that it will increase the amount of harm brought about. If you decide to go for a ride and the GHG concentration in the atmosphere is still below the next critical threshold, the total amount of harm might remain unchanged.4,7,8,48 A first answer to this line of argument is to state one more time that climate change is also an incremental phenomenon and that each contribution makes the problem worse (the existence of thresholds just means that some contributions will cause more harm than others). A second answer is to appeal to the expected marginal harm associated with individual acts such as a ride for fun. The reasoning goes as follows. If your emissions are just the ones that allow the concentration to reach the triggering level, then they can have potentially disastrous consequences. But we cannot know where the thresholds stand exactly. Moreover, the contribution that triggers the harm cannot be the only one incriminated because the threshold would not obtain without all the other contributions.28,46 Therefore, we should focus on expected marginal harm (i.e., the harm associated with the crossing of the threshold multiplied by the probability that your particular set of emissions will be the one that triggers it) rather than on actual marginal harm.18,29,30,46 In other words, you ought to refrain from emitting, because there is a risk that your emissions will trigger a harmful threshold. Critics of this line of response argue in return that the climate system is so complex that we have no particular reason to think that it is empirically possible for individual emissions to trigger a harmful threshold.7,8 But, as we have seen earlier, individual emissions, or at least some of them, must make a difference somehow for the global effects to unfold. A precise description of how this happens physically does not appear to be necessary for the normative assessment of individual contributions. No Direct Causal Pathway Another possible argument in favor of the causal inefficacy of individual emissions is to assert that individual contributions to climate change fail to meet the relevant definition of causation. This is mainly due to the conjunction of two features of climate change: it is caused by the accumulation of numerous tiny causal factorsj and the harms brought about by the excess of carbon dioxide emissions are mediated by a series of complex climatic processes. As a consequence, it is not possible to match individual emissions with instances of harm such as particular weather events. The question here is whether or not the fact that the effects of our behavior are only indirect cancels our share of responsibility for these outcomes, and thereby our duty to prevent them. The answer is probably yes if we stick to the traditional conception of responsibility requiring a direct and straightforward causation process, as in the case of individual-to-individual interactions.4,11,13,27,50–54 However, many authors argue that in the face of the new harms the contemporary world is experiencing, we should revise this conception and include indirect effects in the purview of our conceptions of morality and justice.31,55–57k In a more technical way, others argue that what should be considered as the relevant sense of ‘causality’ is not direct causation but the ‘contributory effect’ of each individual. Various criteria have been proposed to assess whether individual emissions can be deemed to be part of the causation process (whether they are ‘causally relevant factors’), such as the so-called NESS test, where individuals are contributing to the outcome if they are a Necessary Element of at least one Sufficient Set of conditions (NESS)45,60–62 (see also Ref 63). Same Amount of GHG Will Be Emitted Anyway Now, let us assume that our personal emissions are not negligible, that they do cause marginal harm and that the indirectness of their effect does not absolve us from responsibility. It might still appear plausible to say that our acts make no difference, because in at least some circumstances the amounts emitted will remain the same whatever we decide to do. Consider the case of air travel (and see endnote for other market effects with similar results)l. If you refrain from flying to Barcelona for your long weekend, it is very likely that the plane will take off anyway, because the flights are scheduled months in advance. Thus, if we make the assumption that the total number of flights remains the same, the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere will be the same whether you fly or not. Let us say that there must be 100 people buying a ticket for the airline to schedule an additional flight in the future (I borrow this example from Ref 33). This means that if you are in any other position than the 100th customer, the fact that you fly does not make any marginal difference to the global GHG emissions. The number of flights remains the same and you do not add CO2 to the atmosphere compared to what would have been emitted anyway.6,19,30,33,39 However, if your purchase is the one that triggers the threshold (the 100th or any multiple of 100) the actual consequences are quite important. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Overview wires.wiley.com/climatechange Assuming that the economy really works like this (and not in a more incremental way as is plausible), the most popular response, as in the case of climatic thresholds, is to appeal to a calculation of expected harm. Insofar as it is hard to know exactly where the thresholds stand, the argument goes, it is fairer for every contributors to focus on the difference they might make instead of the difference they will actually make.18,22,30,33 The calculation of expected harm is simply the harm caused by the crossing of a threshold (here the harm brought about by an additional flight) multiplied by the probability that one particular individual will be the one that triggers it (1% in our air travel example). The expected marginal harm of your purchase of a ticket to Barcelona is therefore positive, even if it makes no difference on this particular flight. To put it another way, buying your ticket has the effect of increasing the demand, which makes it more likely that air travel supply will increase over the long term. Therefore, the argument goes, you have a duty to avoid flying. Noncausation-Based Arguments In the face of the controversy about causal inefficacy, various attempts have been made to bypass the problem and justify an individual duty to reduce one’s carbon footprint without reference to the actual or expected consequences. In this section, I list and briefly comment the most prominent of these ‘noncausation-based’ arguments. Integrity One line of argument maintains that even if refraining from performing GHG intensive actions makes no difference, we ought to do it all the same because it says something about our integrity as moral agents. This idea can be developed in various ways. For instance, as an answer to the argument that ‘the same amount of GHG will be emitted anyway,’ some authors argue that what counts from a moral point of view is the result of our own actions.67,68 We ought to keep our hands clean.m So, if your flying to Hawaii for the weekend makes no difference because the plane would fly anyway, you still ought to refrain from doing it because otherwise harm would be brought about through your agency (and not that of someone else).38,57 But let us assume that a single flight is absolutely insignificant and that no harm at all would be caused through your agency. Some authors submit that it is still morally unwarranted to fly, because you would be complicit in or participate to a hugely harmful global practice57,64,69 (for this argument applied to other similar issues, see Refs 70 and 71). The reason complicity is a bad thing, in turn, can be grounded on the idea that our acts have an expressive function and tell something about who we are, what we think and which values we endorse.69 Notwithstanding, the point has been made that such an argument does not apply to GHG emissions because there is no definite group emitters could ‘join’ in the same way as people join a violent and uncoordinated mob.29 Other writers argue that arguments from complicity do not succeed because GHG emissions are not intrinsically wrong (unlike complicity in other collective problems such as child labor or racism).4,7 Along a different line, Marion Hourdequin has argued that integrity does not only mean the internalization of one’s values and beliefs regarding certain issues, but also the integration of all one’s commitments into a coherent whole.72 Thus, an argument from consistency can be made, enjoining people thinking that climate change should be tackled on the collective or political level to change their lifestyle accordingly. It is a matter of consistency or coherence to harmonize one’s values on the collective and the individual levels.19,69,72,73 But even though this view appears appealing, it is vulnerable to the objection that there is nothing inconsistent with promoting collective action and at the same time maintaining one’s lavish lifestyle, precisely because individual actions make no difference.3,8 For one thing, what can be replied is that such an attitude could nevertheless be perceived as hypocritical, which would undermine one’s advocacy work for a political solution.3,72 For another, lifestyle changes might inspire similar changes by others and help start up a collective shift (more on this in the section on the duty to promote collective action).72,74 Fairness Another rationale on which an individual duty to reduce one’s carbon footprint can be based is the idea that individuals ought to do their part of the collective endeavor to fight climate change. Indeed, at the collective level the problem of causal inefficacy does not arise and it is a widely held view that we have a collective duty to reduce our GHG emissions. Some authors derive from it a moral obligation to do one’s part of the emission reductions.34,75,76n One way to make sense of this idea is to attribute a ‘fair share’ of the global carbon budget to each individual, which she is legitimately entitled to emit (emission rights). Indeed, climate scientists have come to the conclusion that if we wish to have at least a 66% chance of limiting warming to 2 C, cumulative emissions as of 2011 should not go beyond a trillion tons © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. WIREs Climate Change Climate change and individual duties of CO2.42 The remaining budget has thus to be shared among the whole humanity according to some criterion of distributive justice. As a result, if everybody stuck to her fair share dangerous climate change would likely be avoided (even though more and more voices argue for a +1.5 C limit). The upshot of this approach is, as Christian Baatz argues, that people emitting more than they are entitled to not only contribute to a harmful activity but also deprive other agents of part of their fair share.76,77o Regardless of whether individual emissions are harmful or not, using more than one’s share is thus at odds with the demands of fairness.p Hence, individuals have a prima facie duty to stick to their emission rights, which for most Westerners means a reduction of their carbon footprint. Going for a joyride is morally permissible as long as it stays within the limits of one’s fair share of emissions. However, this is unlikely to be the case of people with affluent lifestyles who generally have a very large carbon footprint.62,76 This argument has been challenged along different lines, one of them being the difficulty in specifying what a fair share is. This is a complex debate that cannot be fully reproduced here, but we can gain a small insight into it by considering the criterion of equal share per capita. The idea that every human being is entitled to the same share of the carbon budget as the others appears indeed quite common sense. However, various philosophers have argued that departures from equality are justified by various criteria such as the energy needed to fulfill one’s basic needs, the possibility to use alternative energies or the endowment of agents with other kind of goods and resources (see Ref 84). In other words, the size of one’s fair share is very sensitive to personal circumstances, which means that the level of permissible emissions must be assessed on a case-by-case basis (see Refs 76 and 84).q However, this difficulty does not exonerate affluent people from the duty to reduce their carbon footprint, insofar as they are most plausible overshooting their share by a wide margin. A second challenge is that, in the absence of a collective agreement, GHG emissions are de facto not in limited supply. Even though we can give moral reasons for why and how individual shares should be constrained, it is not true that emitting more than one’s fair share deprives others of their emission rights. Nobody is prevented from emitting.88 A response to this objection would be to say that in anticipation of a future collective scheme it would be unfair to deplete the carbon budget more than one would be allowed under the scheme.7 Even though some authors have argued that such a collective agreement on a finite carbon budget is unlikely to be implemented in the foreseeable future,7,8 hope is rekindling after the COP 21 in Paris in 2015 that this could happen sooner than expected. However, the features that such an agreement should display (e.g. binding or non-binding, target in terms of temperature or GHG, etc.) to have bearing on individual duties have not yet been be fully considered (but see Ref 62 and 88). Finally, it can be argued that such an account of individual duties is vulnerable to situations of partial compliance. Indeed, since it is unlikely that many people will comply with their duty in the real world, this situation would be unfair to the compliers who endure the costs.90 However, one response to this objection is that even though such a situation would be unfair to compliers, releasing them from their duty would be even more unfair to the victims who bear the consequences of climate change62 (see also section on demandingness below). Universalization Principles One obvious way to respond to this last argument about partial compliance is to say that individuals have a duty to reduce their carbon footprint irrespective of what others do. This sometimes takes the shape of hypothetical generalizations of the type of action one is about to perform. In other words, it amounts to asking ‘what if everybody did that?’ For instance, some authors have sought to justify an individual duty to adopt a sustainable lifestyle grounded in the principles of Kantian ethics.73,85,91 For Kant, the decisive criterion to assess the morality of an act is not the consequences it brings about but its conformity with the moral law. The test, for an act to be permissible, is that the maxim of the action (i.e., the practical rule one follows) must be able to be universalized without contradiction. The classical example is the maxim ‘make false promises.’ I have a moral obligation not to make false promises, because if everybody were behaving according to that maxim this would undermine trust between people and render it impossible to make promises, genuine or false, in the first place. Making false promises, if universalized, is self-defeating. In our case, this test is mostly relevant to maxims describing recurring acts or types of action such as ‘commute with your private car’ and ‘perform GHG emitting activities.’ At first glance there seems to be no contradiction in the universalization of such maxims. Bad consequences for sure, but no internal contradiction.4 However, as some have argued, if maxims such as ‘commute with your private car’ were to be universally followed as a rule, this would ultimately bring about resource scarcity and a © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Overview wires.wiley.com/climatechange civilization collapse that would undermine the very possibility of consuming fossil fuels or driving a private cars.73,91 Against this line of argument, it has been objected that, contrary to the case of false promises, this is a very practical (and not logical) contradiction in that it relies on empirical knowledge about the current world.8 Indeed, there would be no problem, and hence no contradiction, with performing GHG emitting activities in a world far less populated than the current one. Which kind of contradiction (logical or practical) exactly counts in Kantian orthodoxy is a subject of controversy among specialists, but, assuming that this objection is valid, at least one response appears possible. It is to go a level of generality further and consider a maxim such as ‘live unsustainably.’85 Insofar as an unsustainable way of life can by definition not be universalized without undermining itself (logical contradiction), it is contrary to the moral law. Therefore, Kantian ethics leads to an individual duty to live sustainably. The problem here is that this injunction is very general and is a poor guide for particular actions. It is, in Kantian terms, an imperfect duty, that is one that leaves individuals with leeway in how to carry it out. Other authors have also argued that Kantianism is too disconnected from consequences and too focused on the intentionality behind actions to take the environmental side effects of everyday actions into account.5,92 A more intuitive way to appeal to universalization is to say that we have a moral obligation not to act in ways that, if performed by everybody, would cause a net loss of well-being. It is clear that if everybody emitted large amounts of GHG the consequences would be very bad. This principle seems thus initially appealing. However, critics have pointed out that it is implausible because it gives counter-intuitive results in other cases. For example, that it would be bad if nobody had children does not mean that we have a duty to reproduce.4,6 Virtue Another way to respond to causal inefficacy and partial compliance objections is to appeal to virtue. The idea here is to focus the moral assessment not on individual acts or maxims but on character traits. Indeed, if individuals ought to display certain character traits by engaging in certain kinds of behavior, then they ought to behave this way regardless of the actual consequences of their acts and regardless of what others do. But, insofar as consequences are of great importance in climate ethics (it is indeed all about how to avoid harmful consequences), virtue ethicists usually opt for hybrid accounts where virtues are designed to play an intermediary role between individual acts and collective outcomes. For instance, Ronald Sandler proposes a two-tier theory including: firstly a consequentialist evaluation of character traits (they are virtues if they generally promote the good), and secondly an evaluation of actions in light of these virtues.5 In a similar vein, Dale Jamieson argues that when it comes to collective action problems such as environmental issues, giving up on individual outcome calculations and focusing on virtues gives better overall results.92 Among the character traits most relevant to environmental problems he cites a mix of traditional and new virtues such as humility, temperance, mindfulness, or the respect for nature.9,12,13,92 Under some interpretations, the value of integrity described at the beginning of this section can also be considered as a virtue. Objections include the claim that character traits are too general to be action guiding and that virtues such as respect for nature and practical wisdom might be difficult to fulfill in modern societies, insofar as we are dependent on its fossil fuel intensive infrastructure.8 Another potential problem is that virtue-oriented agents appear overly focused on ‘saving their own soul’ without regard to the global catastrophe unfolding. For instance, agents adopting the ‘keep one’s hands clean’ principle (related to the virtue of integrity) could reduce their carbon footprint to the level of sustainability and become indifferent to the problem. But that would appear rather self-centered, and maybe counterproductive, when quite a lot of other things can be done to try to prevent the disaster.3,8,40 Extent of the Duty All in all, and despite some challenges, it is safe to say that most authors accept that individuals have at least some duty to reduce their carbon footprint. But, whatever the arguments they use to justify that, virtually no one claims that moral agents must totally cease to emit GHGs.r There are different reasons why we would want to limit the extent of individual duties in general and climate duties in particular. Here I summarize the two most common ones, the notions of demandingness and control.s Demandingness The idea behind the demandingness objection is that there is a limit to the demands morality can put on individuals. Indeed, ethical reasoning can sometimes lead to the formulation of duties that appear intuitively too costly (economically, psychologically, socially, etc.) or burdensome for the duty bearer.t For instance, if the lifetime GHG emissions of the average © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. WIREs Climate Change Climate change and individual duties American are really responsible for the death of two future persons, as John Nolt argues, then we can plausibly imagine that the correlative duty would be to bring our emissions down to zero. Indeed, what can justify the death of two persons? But for an individual acting alone in the context of modern societies (with very low compliance), this could result in marginalization and an almost complete loss of life prospects. Even reducing one’s carbon footprint to the level of sustainability (approximately 2 tons of CO2 per year) could prove extremely difficult and involve major sacrifices.76,93 Hence, most climate ethicists have sought strategies to mitigate somewhat the burden of individual climate duties. One can simply appeal to the notion of reasonableness and say that individuals should not be required to make unreasonable sacrifices or say that citizens of developed countries have a duty to reduce their emissions ‘as much as they can.’69,94,95 But how can such lax duties be justified in the face of the predicted devastating consequences of climate change? One possible answer to this question is that individuals are entitled to have a life of their own and that life projects of particular importance and legitimate expectations must be taken into account.84,93,95,96 Thus, under such a view certain persons could be allowed to fly to Mecca for religious reasons, whereas taking the same flight for sheer touristic reasons would not be morally justified.u For some writers, the claim that religious or professional or familial aspirations can override the life-threatening consequences of climate change is justified by the idea that taking part in producing a collective harm is less bad than causing it directly like in cases of face-to-face harm infliction.96 Another option to limit the scope of individual duties, akin to the fair share argument mentioned earlier, is to claim that duties amount to what individuals would be expected to do under a just collective agreement, and not more. This position holds in particular that individuals have no obligation to take up the slack left by noncompliers.84 However, this principle appears quite arbitrary when the cost to the victims by far exceeds the cost of making up for noncompliers.8,62v Various writers have tried to find a somewhat more objective (and more stringent) characterization of our duties. They draw on Henry Shue’s famous distinction between subsistence and luxury emissions.99 Whereas subsistence emissions provide us with the means to fulfill our basics needs, luxury emissions are those that go beyond the essential for the purpose of convenience or pleasure. Hence, the argument goes, individuals are responsible only for the harm caused by their luxury emissions.28 It would be too demanding for them to give up their subsistence emissions, at least when there is no reasonable low-carbon alternative, because they reflect moral claims that are on a par with those of the future victims of climate change, such as the right to enjoy basic capabilities or to lead a decent life.16,20,21,33,34,62,76 A first difficulty with this account is that there is no objective and clear line of demarcation between subsistence and luxury. We understand that food production falls into the category of subsistence and that flying to the Bahamas for leisure in that of luxury. But, where should we classify the act of driving to work? A second difficulty is that, paradoxically, rural societies can secure the level of subsistence with less GHGs than industrial societies. Yet, it would be rather disingenuous of developed countries to say that they have to maintain their high GHG emissions to secure subsistence.100 In the same spirit, other writers mention a right to self-defense as a way to protect some basic entitlements from a duty to cease emitting. However, they note that this right is sharply limited, in particular by considerations of proportionality.49,101,102 Finally, some authors offer a controversial answer to the question by appealing to carbon offsetting schemes as a way to discharge one’s duty at moderate costs.29,38 This is controversial in part because it allows agents to emit as much as they want, as long as they offset (see Ref 103). A major problem with demandingness objections is that they are usually not compatible with an adequate response to climate change. Indeed, even if everyone got rid of her luxury emissions this would not necessarily be enough to stop the dangerous accumulation of GHGs in the atmosphere.76 There is hence a conflict between the intuition that we must bring climate change under control and the intuition that morality cannot ask too much from individuals.104 As we will see later, this is a strong argument in favor of an institutionalist approach to climate ethics, which sees justice as a matter of law rather than individual behavior. Control The idea that one cannot be held responsible for outcomes that are not under one’s control is a widely held ethical principle that has, among others, been applied to climate change.28,31,50,95,105 In terms of duties, this principle is often instantiated by the Kantian rule ‘ought implies can,’ which is usually interpreted as meaning that people should not have a duty to do things that are not in their power. Indeed, various authors have argued that a substantial part © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Overview wires.wiley.com/climatechange of an individual carbon footprint is contingent on different structural factors such as the type of economy and infrastructure or the regulatory framework and the wealth of the society one lives in.32,41,48,76,94,106 As a consequence, the argument goes, there is a limit to the control one has over one’s carbon footprint and individual duties should be limited accordingly. This is probably true but we have to be cautious here, because the control or ‘ought implies can’ argument can easily be mixed up with the argument from demandingness. Consider the following example: if there is no choice in someone’s neighborhood but to buy coal-generated electricity from the local provider, we might think that it is impossible to get rid of the related GHG emissions. But in fact, if one has a very stringent duty to stop emitting CO2, one still has the option to stop consuming electricity altogether. If such a duty appears intuitively implausible, it is not because it is beyond one’s control but because it would be far too demanding (Gardiner makes this point at the collective level, see Ref 49). Hence, if the argument from control is to be different from demandingness it must only account for emissions that are really impossible to avoid. Examples include the part of the emissions necessary to build, run and maintain the main institutions of a country and its collective infrastructure. These emissions have to be shared out among all the citizens, thereby increasing their carbon footprint, but are tied to no one’s individual consumption. There is no way for the citizens to directly affect these emissions by means of lifestyle changes (except through the communicative potential of such action, see below). This brings us to a second kind of duty. The Duty to Promote and Support Collective Action Insofar as climate change is a collective action problem it is natural to consider a duty of another kind, not directed toward individual behavior changes but toward the promotion of action at the collective scale.w Virtually every author (at least among those taking a stance) acknowledges that individuals have some duty to promote collective action, including those who deny the existence of a duty to reduce one’s carbon footprint.x But when it comes to a more precise justification and description of promotional duties, the debate is still at an early stage despite some illuminating contributions. There are two related ways to approach collective action against climate change. A bottom–up approach focuses on changing lifestyles and social norms, whereas a more top–down approach focuses on institutional solutions. These two approaches are related because a shift in social norms can enable the creation of new institutions and, conversely, institutions contribute to shape social norms. After setting out the general justifications for the existence of promotional duties, I take these two levels of application in turn. Justifications Why would people have promotional duties in the first place? After all one could claim, as Walter Sinnott-Armstrong does, that fighting climate change is the job of governments and professional politicians, not that of individuals.4 As it happens, most authors writing on the subject precisely start from the absence of action at the collective level to argue for individual duties to take things in hand. These duties are grounded in similar principles. Stephen Gardiner, for instance, mentions the model of delegated responsibility. The idea is that citizens delegate part of their responsibility for solving problems to their political representatives, and that this responsibility falls back on the citizens when current institutions fail to discharge it.15y Elizabeth Cripps gives a similar justification starting from the idea that groups (even unstructured groups without any form of organization) have a weak collective responsibility to prevent collective harms such as climate change. Insofar as this collective responsibility remains unfulfilled, it translates into duties to promote collective action on the part of individuals as members of the group.8 Simon Caney emphasizes the fact that in the absence of a collective scheme, the odds of a massive noncompliance with duties to curb GHG emissions (what he calls ‘first-order’ responsibilities) are high. In such a context, some agents get ‘second-order’ responsibilities to improve and secure compliance. This follows from the imperative to prevent catastrophic climate change (what he calls ‘Harm Avoidance Justice’).107 Along a similar line, Carol Booth argues that staying politically passive (‘bystanding’) in the face of very bad events is morally wrong and that a duty stronger than simply reducing one’s emissions is warranted.108 Finally, Advocates of the socalled institutional approach of justice (epitomized by the philosophy of John Rawls) claim that justice is inherently a quality of institutions and should not be contingent on individual action. On this view, justice is a collective project that transcends the sum of individual actions. As a consequence, individuals have a duty to promote and maintain just institutions rather than acting themselves to redress injustices.84,109 Notice, however, that maintaining democratic © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. WIREs Climate Change Climate change and individual duties institutions and promoting effective climate policies might conflict under certain conditions.111 Changing Social Norms A first way to foster collective action is to work on social norms. Indeed, emission patterns are partly dependent on deeply entrenched social and cultural practices that shape individual lifestyles. Hence, changing these norms has the power to change GHG emitting behaviors on a large scale. Shifting the representation of green lifestyles from something marginal and restrictive to something mainstream and enjoyable can, according to some, yield great climatic benefits. As far as individuals are concerned, this kind of change can be promoted through a variety of different avenues. The most commonly invoked is to use the communicative potential of one’s own actions. Biking to work not only reduces one’s carbon footprint, it also sets an example and might influence and encourage others to do so. This purported amplifying effect (see Ref 5) of green behaviors can thus be viewed as a further justification for individual emission reductions, not for their own sake but instrumentally as a way to promote collective action.6,8,20,29,30,34,72,108,109,111 However, the problem with such an argument is that it relies on empirical assumptions difficult to confirm about the communicative power of individual actions. It is easy to imagine that some public persons such as A-list celebrities or politicians might have an influence on lifestyle tendencies, but this is much harder to ascertain for average citizens.5,44 For one thing, certain acts, such as taking shorter showers or turning down the thermostat, are not public and cannot serve as examples. For another, even public acts such as commuting by bike are unlikely to be noticed and to have influence if they are not backed by a communication strategy.44 Other ways to influence social norms include advocacy work and efforts to shape the way green lifestyles are framed. For instance, whether climatefriendly behaviors are depicted as burdensome or enjoyable in the media might make a difference on the willingness of people to adopt them. Simon Caney suggests that figures such as journalists, poets, novelists or gifted communicators have a special ‘second-order’ duty to promote green lifestyles.107z Changing Policies and Institutions In spite of the possibility to change social norms directly, various writers, including some of those arguing for lifestyle changes, claim that addressing climate change properly cannot dispense with changes in the regulations and institutions that shape our societies. Climate justice is inescapably a political issue and cannot be discharged by individuals alone. But why would such an institutional approach be superior to a more bottom-up approach? Most of the reasons for this have already been mentioned in the previous sections and usually fall into one of three categories put forward by Elizabeth Cripps. Effectiveness: lifestyle changes can achieve only so much and responses to the climate challenge are bound to stay ineffective if the issue is not tackled (also) from the institutional side. It is so for various reasons including the facts that: (1) without binding regulations widespread noncompliance is to be expected;3,15,84,107–109 (2) insofar as a substantial part of the emissions is not under the control of individuals, the necessary cuts cannot be achieved without structural changes, even under the hypothesis of full compliance.32,48,84,108 Efficiency: as we saw earlier, it can be very costly for individuals to reduce their carbon footprint depending on the circumstances in which they live. The institutional approach alleviates this burden by enabling the adoption of climate-friendly lifestyles.8,84,94,107 The economic and social cost of curbing GHG emissions can be reduced through the development of public transportation and renewable energies, for instance, or by adapting working conditions to the new constraints. It is also plausible that the social and psychological cost of giving up on some GHG intensive activities would be lower if everybody changed at the same time, and consequently new that this sacrifice is not ‘useless.’93,109 Fairness: a collective scheme is the proper way to tackle collective action problems because cases of partial compliance are unfair to the compliers.8,94,109 Why should they make efforts when the others do not budge? Institutional solutions are also fairer because they clarify individual fair shares and make it possible for virtuous individuals to stick to them without having to take up the slack for the noncompliers.84 In Practice The institutional view implies firstly a citizens’ duty to support legitimate institutions and regulations. This includes complying with the regulatory framework, refraining from undermining its enforcement and a degree of what Kok-Chor Tan calls institutional vigilance.62,76,84,93,109 But in the absence of a just climate regime, citizens have the duty to bring such a regulatory framework about. Here, the aim of promoting duties is not so much to influence fellow citizens, but to foster the creation of new regulations and, if necessary, new institutions more adapted to the challenge. This can © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Overview wires.wiley.com/climatechange be interpreted in a minimal sense as the duty to ‘at least vote green,’7 as well as in broader terms as including all the actions at the disposal of active citizens. This includes: writing blogs and articles, petitioning the local government, emailing one’s representatives or executives, campaigning and voting for candidates, lobbying, running for office, organizing and/or attending rallies, donating to organizations, and the like.8,84 This could even include, under some circumstances, performing acts of civil disobedience.15,107 Note that on this view, individual lifestyle changes can also play a role as indications of a willingness to change for policy makers.93,109 The main objection against such a view is again an argument from causal inefficacy. Why would individual action make more of a difference here than in the case of emission reductions? Are your ballot and your presence at a rally not as insignificant and useless as your individual emission cuts? Various responses to this challenge have been proposed. Elizabeth Cripps argues that, unlike unilateral emission reductions, promotional efforts are not ‘throw-away acts’ but contribute to a cumulative collective endeavor.8 This appears somewhat contentious, because a rally can make absolutely no difference (activists do not always get what they seek), whereas emission reductions can pile up almost indefinitely. Nevertheless, as Carol Booth argues, though the outcome of political activism is fraught with uncertainty, it can potentially yield much greater results than individual emission cuts.108 In other words, it is our best hope to address climate change meaningfully. Demandingness Promotional duties are also subject to demandingness issues, insofar as they are potentially endless given the inertia of political processes. But even though these duties falling on citizens might appear quite demanding, they must nevertheless be discharged. As Stephen Gardiner notes, modern democratic regimes have been so effective at delegating responsibility to professional politicians that average citizens have forgotten what it takes to play an active role in the steering of a society.15 The most demanding account of promotional duties to date is probably Elizabeth Cripps’s. In her view, those who are the most able to do something about climate change and those who have contributed to its causes (the polluters) must carry out promotional duties up to the point where they would have to give up some of their central human functionings (life, health, bodily integrity, practical reason, etc.).8 In contrast, Neuteleers and Tan argue that within an institutionalist approach citizens’ duties to promote just institutions are limited by considerations of costs and liberty. For the sake of value pluralism, the pursuit of justice should not be the only legitimate aim in one’s life.84,109 Also, various writers agree that the scope of promotional duties is not the same for every citizen. Some of them endorse a ‘with power comes responsibility’ view, according to which the most powerful and influential people have special duties to tackle climate change (and correlative responsibilities in case of failure) that ordinary citizens do not have. Politicians and economic decision makers, for example, have a greater responsibility to act in their respective domains.78,94,107 Elizabeth Cripps tempers this view by arguing that, whereas we cannot expect the same outcomes from every individual, morality imposes the same demand (i.e., effort) upon them. Average citizens should not be expected to devote less of their time to the cause than talented communicators or influential thinkers.8aa CONCLUSION It should be clear from this review that most writers agree that individuals have a duty to take at least some steps to reduce their GHG emissions, be it for their own sake or instrumentally with the aim of promoting collective action. It is equally clear that citizens also have a duty to act toward an institutional solution to the problem. However, the authors differ quite a lot with regard to the stringency of these duties. One upshot of this debate, in particular, is that the extent of one’s duties depends heavily on the particular circumstances of the agent and on the cost of complying with them. This means that there is no way to determine in the abstract what such duties precisely involve, and suggests that such a question should be answered, at least partially, on a case by case basis. This also seems to be true, although there is no consensus among writers on that point, when it comes to deciding which one of the two duties considered here (that of reducing one’s carbon footprint and that of promoting collective action) takes precedence when they conflict. Over the last 10 years, philosophers have come a long way toward identifying the reasons why individuals should care about climate justice and how they ought (or ought not) to act on it. But, more work still needs to be done, in particular when it comes to the question of how exacting the demands of duty should be and the integration of individual climate duties with other duties of justice such as poverty alleviation. In the meantime, my hope is that this review will help raise awareness on the fact that climate justice is not an issue just for high-level negotiators, but must also be addressed at the individual level. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. WIREs Climate Change Climate change and individual duties NOTES a However, regarding the duty to meet the costs of adaptation, see Ref 10. Regarding the duty to directly help the victims of climate change, see Ref 8. b Jamieson encapsulates this in his now classic story of Jack and Jill. c For the view that common sense morality nevertheless gives us some sense of what we ought to do in the face of climate change, see Refs 15 and 16. Even though these authors acknowledge that global environmental problems challenge our ethical theories, they maintain that the current inaction is best understood as a motivational and institutional problem. d An earlier article by Baylor Johnson makes the argument that individual restraint is not warranted in the case of a tragedy of the commons (and according to him climate change is such a case), because it would be a ‘fruitless sacrifice.’3 This constitutes another version of the ‘no difference’ argument that focuses on the lack of positive effect when one restrains from emitting GHG. For another article, about air pollution, that prefigures many aspects and arguments of the current debate, see Ref 17. e A large part of the debate revolves around the concepts of harm and causation. It is a widely held view among philosophers that the duty not to harm others without a good reason is a fundamental feature of our moral life and that climate change contradicts this duty.8,20,21 But a causal link must be ascertained between an act and the harm for this principle to obtain. If I know that my act is not going to cause harm, I have no reason to refrain from performing it. Consequentialist theories are sometimes deemed to fall pray to the problem of causal inefficacy in a similar way (see Refs 22 and 23). f Data from: http://cdiac.ornl.gov. In 2011, global emissions amounted to 34.5 billion tons of CO2. g This is a version of what philosophers call the Sorites paradox. h Taking the next millennium into account might come as a surprise to non-philosophers. However, in the field of applied ethics it is usually accepted that distance in space and time plays no role in the moral assessment of an action. Causing the death of a person is bad, regardless of the proximity of the victim. On discounting, see Ref 36. i To be sure, there are strong evidences that such non linear features do exist, but they supplement rather than replace the incremental nature of climate change.42,47 j This is sometimes referred to as the « fragmentation of agency »49 or as « the problem of many hands ».50 k The necessity to take the indirect effects of our actions into account has quite often been stressed in the context of other issues of global justice such as poverty and exploitation.58,59 l Other market effects, that I cannot describe in the main text for reasons of space, have been mentioned. For instance, Benjamin Hale argues that due to the Hotelling Rule governing the extraction of finite resources, all the fossil fuel reserves will ultimately be burnt. He concludes that for this reason individual restraint will in the end make no difference.64 In the same vein, ‘carbon leakage’ (the emission cuts in developed countries result in the outsourcing of polluting industries to developing countries) and various kinds of ‘rebound effects’ (a drop in fossil fuels demand results in lower prices, which in turn boosts new demand by others) can be observed at the global scale.3,44,65,66 However, determining whether these effects really offset individual efforts to curb GHG emissions is particularly tricky. It seems plausible that individual reductions can at least slow down somewhat the rise of CO2 emissions (see Ref 62). m In his influential article, Jonathan Glover dubbed this the Solzhenitsyn principle, by reference to the ideas expressed in the novelist’s Nobel lecture.68 n The same question arises about whether collective (backward-looking) responsibility for climate-related harms can be distributed to individuals.28,63,78,79 o Of course, apart from its role in the debate about individual duties, the fair share argument has a long history within the subfield of distributive climate justice, where philosophers discuss the fairer way to distribute emission rights among nations and/or individuals. For a collection of seminal articles on this issue, see Ref 80. p Another way to characterize the wrongness of not doing one’s part is in terms of free riding.29 This argument has mostly been made as a way to justify backward-looking responsibility and liability to bear the costs of climate change. Collectives and individuals emitting more than their fare share (or inheriting the benefits of past emissions) are benefitting from an ‘unjust enrichment’ and they ought to give this back by bearing the costs of climate change.66,81,82 q Some authors argue that the duty to reduce one’s carbon footprint is thus an imperfect duty, that is a duty that gives leeway as to how to discharge it.44,76,85 Some others argue against this view.86,87 r John Broome is almost making such a claim when he writes: ‘each of us is under a duty of justice not to cause the emission of greenhouse gas without compensating the people who are harmed as a result. Your carbon footprint ought to be zero, unless you make restitution.’38 However, he allows the use of carbon offsetting to comply with this duty. s Another reason why individuals could be dispensed with complying with their duties is excusable ignorance. There is a wide consensus among authors that at least since the 1990s individuals in western countries can reasonably be expected to be aware of the problems associated with GHG emissions; see, for example, Refs 28 and 93. However, for the opposite view, see Ref 9. t There is a longstanding debate in philosophy about the status of this demandingness objection. Does it modify the extent of our duties in the first place, or does it only provide us with legitimate excuses for not complying with them? We do not need to enter into the details of this © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Overview wires.wiley.com/climatechange debate, but a clarification might be useful. Demandingness has traditionally been associated with duties to help others, which can potentially be endless, rather than with duties not to harm. In the traditional sense, it is indeed for most of us quite easy to avoid killing, wounding or hurting others. But as it has already been mentioned at the outset of this article, accumulative harms stray from these paradigmatic cases and give rise to potentially weighty duties. u For a brief objection to this line of argument, see Ref 20. v There is a growing philosophical literature about the existence of a duty to take up the slack in situations of partial compliance. For applications to the case of climate change, see Refs 8, 34, 76, 97 and 98. w Different names have been proposed for this duty. Here I call it ‘promotional duty’ after Elizabeth Cripps.8 The broad meaning of the term allows different kinds of actions to enter into this category. x Or maybe should I say especially those who deny the existence of mitigation duties. The need to focus on the collective scale rather than on personal reductions was part of the original argument against such a duty by Baylor Johnson and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong.3,4 As for Elizabeth Cripps, a substantive part of her book it devoted to the idea that promotional duties take precedence over emission reductions.8 This being said, authors arguing for a duty to reduce one’s carbon footprint usually also agree that we have promotional duties. Hence, the dichotomy between ‘lifestyle’ and ‘institutional’ approaches should not be overemphasized. y In the backward-looking sense, Steve Vanderheiden argues that individuals can be held responsible (qua citizens) for the failure of their government to take steps against climate change, even if they do not themselves emit greenhouse gases.79 z To be sure, means to influence social norms are not limited to these examples. For instance, Simon Caney mentions the role scientists and engineers play in the enablement of new lifestyles and the rectification of erroneous and misleading information about climate change.107 aa With the exception of these individuals who have voluntarily taken on institutional responsibilities. Cripps argues that more can be demanded from professional politicians and institutional actors.8 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Stephen Gardiner, Anja Karnein, Christian Baatz, and an anonymous reviewer for insightful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this article. Any and all errors are mine alone. I also gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant P2LAP1_151774). REFERENCES 1. Moellendorf D. Climate change and global justice. WIREs Clim Change 2012, 3:131–143. 2. Caney S. Distributive justice and climate change. In: Olsaretti S, ed. Oxford Handbook of Distributive Justice. 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