Photo: Niko Havranek
This colloquium talk is planned as an in-person event. Registration is only required for non-CEU members.
ABSTRACT
A Defence of Overdemandingness Considerations in Climate Ethics
(with Martin Sticker, University of Bristol)
We argue that under certain circumstances climate ethicists can successfully appeal to the problem of overdemandingness in order to mitigate demands on individuals.
Recently, a number of climate ethicists have argued that those living in high per-capita emitting countries ought to have fewer children. Opponents of this view believe that it is permissible to procreate given that agents cannot be reasonably required to sacrifice goods that make their lives worth living, including having children. Chad Vance recently criticised this appeal to overdemandingness, i.e. that certain supposed duties must be mitigated because they are unreasonably demanding. He argues that under the assumption that the additional emissions created through having a child cause harm to others, appeal to overdemandingness is unsuccessful.
We agree with Vance that demandingness considerations are much weaker in cases of directly harming others, but think that he is mistaken in characterising procreation as a straightforward case of causing harm. Instead, if procreation makes others worse off due to the additional GHG emissions it causes, then this effect is created through the actions of intermediaries which are the primary bearers of responsibility for the harm caused: We collectively create social structures which make it the case that having a child causes large amounts of additional GHG emissions, as well as social structures that make people vulnerable to climate impacts that arise from these emissions. If someone forgoes procreation to prevent these harms, then this is best described not as avoiding harming, but as avoiding enabling harm that we collectively would otherwise wrongly cause. This is a form of taking up others’ slack, and thus bearing an unfair level of cost. Slack-taking duties, we argue, are constrained by demandingness considerations.
The idea that fairness is what is behind demandingness concerns has a parallel in Liam Murphy’s work on beneficence. He argues that beneficence is a collective enterprise. If an individual has to sacrifice a lot to help people in need, then this is typically because others are not doing enough. The problem with a purported duty to take up the slack left by others is then not just that it is highly demanding, i.e. very costly. The problem is that it is unfairly costly to the individual who is taking up slack. We avail ourselves of this notion of unfairness and taking-up slack to defend the relevance of overdemandingness for climate ethics, as climate ethics, like beneficence, is also collective in nature.
Finally, we discuss whether overdermandingness as representative of slack-taking extends to issues other than procreation, such as lifestyle emissions that people are forced to undertake because of lack of adequate services (having to commute to work by car, because there is no adequate public transportation system). Whether or not one has to take up slack and what kinds of tasks would count as taking up slack deserves further debate. Moreover, it is a better question to ask than whether having a child is a case of harming others or not.
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