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: The majority of authors writing on this topic seem to agree upon the idea that obligations to mitigate present and future climate changes concern governments and collective groups, not individuals, because there is no direct responsibility of individuals in intending and causing climate change. As individuals, we have the duty to prompt our governments to act against climate change, but we have no obligation to substitute governmental action with ours.1 The clearest recent statement of this view has been given by Walter Sinnott- Armstrong: ' Global warming and climate change occur on such a massive scale that my individual [action] makes no difference to the welfare of anyone. '2 A more moderate position is put forward by Dale Jamieson, who claims that we have various kinds of responsibility for future climate changes, but our responsibility is of a new kind, different from traditional sorts of moral and political responsibility.3  In this paper, I'll do two things. First, I'll provide a detailed analysis of the kind of causality involved in anthropogenic climate change and of the role this sort of causation has in views denying individual moral responsibility for future climate alterations (§ 3). Second, I'll challenge the standard story, by claiming that individuals have full responsibility for climate change, and that the common-sense conception of moral responsibility can be extended to increasing-temperatures conducts (§ 4). This claim will rely on a thicker or more moralized conception of responsibility. As I shall claim in § 1,  The main motivations behind this attempt are the following ones. First,  obscure view of causality and wrong view of responsibility  moral shortcomings of collective responsibility – non-democratic, …. Three preliminary caveats might be helpful.