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: I'll rather start from the idea that the issue of our individual responsibility for climate change needs further examination. But I cannot deny that the source of my concerns in this paper lies in my preference for a consequentialist approach to the morality of climate change. 3. This paper might be read as running contrary to the idea that abatement of emissions is a collective action and a matter of collective responsibility. This would be a wrong reading. What I contend here is that our responsibility for mitigating climate change is not only collective, but also individual – or better, it is collective because it is individual. To put it differently, the main idea of this paper is that, due to certain features of the causal chains involved in climate change and of the actions needed to abate emissions, our collective responsibility for mitigating climate change distributes onto individual responsibility. How and why this is the case it should be clearer in the following sections. However, it should be clear from the outset that my target here is not any claim to the effect that we have collective responsibilities, as members of relevant groups, for the abatement of emissions creating climate change. Rather, the focus of the argument here is a much limited and precise view, to the effect that responsibility for coping with climate change belongs only to collectives, and never to individuals.