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: 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. This result might be regarded as not very significant. After all, if a consequentialist approach to the morality of climate change turns out to be conceptually impossible, so much the worse for consequentialists. However, this is a hasty conclusion. Any conceptual assumption that narrows down the realm of ethical options that can be employed to deal with a specific issue is a suspicious starting point. The best way to conceptualize an issue in moral philosophy is one that allows every substantive stance.