Title: (PDF) Individual Responsibility for Climate Change | Gianfranco Pellegrino - Academia.edu
Headings: Individual Responsibility for Climate Change
Individual Responsibility for Climate Change
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Individual Responsibility for Climate Change

Content: 2. The concern for individual responsibility underlying this paper gets its point from a specific conception of what grounds our obligations. I am here assuming that we have obligations to act only if, and in so far as, our action makes some difference to the state of the world. In this kind of views, any action having no influence at all in producing or preventing some state of affairs is morally indifferent. Differently put, only the moral quality of states of affairs knowingly and reliably produced through action provides a standard of judgement for human conduct. But bringing about a state of affairs in a knowing and reliable way through one's own action means being responsible of it. Accordingly, responsibility is a necessary condition for moral judgment and for the very existence of obligations. This view is usually connected to consequentialist approaches, even though it is obviously not all of the story about consequentialism.5 (Here, I'll not consider whether there are kinds of consequentialism not endorsing this view, nor whether non-consequentialist approaches might endorse it.) Applied to the morality of climate change, this view implies that only if individuals are responsible of it, they can be demanded to do something in order to prevent future climate alterations. Consequently, claiming that global climate change is not a matter of individual responsibility would amount to declare impossible a consequentialist morality of climate change.