Leaving the Ivory Tower? Climate Justice between Theory and Practice
| Date | 01 December 2018 |
| Published date | 01 December 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0090591717744743 |
| Subject Matter | Review Essays |
review-article2018
Review Essay
Political Theory
2018, Vol. 46(6) 947 –958
Leaving the Ivory Tower?
© The Author(s) 2018
Article reuse guidelines:
Climate Justice between
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
journals.sagepub.com/home/ptx
Theory and Practice
Reason in a Dark Time, by Dale Jamieson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
The Moral Challenge of Dangerous Climate Change: Values, Poverty, and Policy, by Darrel
Moellendorf. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection, by Henry Shue. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2014.
Reviewed by: Anja Karnein, Binghamton University–The State University of New York,
NY, USA
DOI: 10.1177/0090591717744743
The weather has not traditionally been a subject of justice. For the longest
time, bad weather has been accepted as an “act of God” or fate, a misfortune
nobody can be blamed for. This has always been somewhat disingenuous.
There will be more fatalities among the poor than among the wealthy when
hot weather leads to draught or heavy rainfalls lead to flooding. And to the
extent poverty is attributable to injustice, which it often is, the reason that
some weather events do more damage in some places and to some people is
frequently a blamable wrong. Unlike “natural” weather events of the tradi-
tional kind, however, climate change is attributable to human action. So it is
not simply that some people who are already subject to injustice are hit
harder, but also that anyone who suffers from the extreme weather events
climate change causes is subject to an injustice. As this is becoming more and
more widely recognized, a growing number of philosophers have been turn-
ing their attention to questions of “climate justice,” proposing answers to
distributional issues such as who should pay for mitigating past and future
damage and for adapting to increasingly hazardous weather.
Just as climate change is challenging the traditional purview of justice, it
has inspired several philosophers, chiefly among them Dale Jamieson, Henry
Shue, and Darrel Moellendorf, to turn their backs on some of the usual ways
of doing normative philosophy. All three authors want to speak to a larger
audience, not just across academic disciplines but also to politicians and
other lay readers. And while they share a commitment to abstaining from
948
Political Theory 46(6)
abstract and idealizing theorizing, they each pursue the task of making phi-
losophy more accessible—and more relevant to real-world concerns—in illu-
minatingly different ways.
Jamieson seeks to provide a realistic reconstruction of why we failed to
prevent climate change when we still stood a chance, not just in the realm of
moral reasoning, but also in the dimensions of politics and economics. From
here he goes on to reflect upon how to lead meaningful lives in the
Anthropocene—the age when human activity has become the major influ-
ence on the environment. Shue and Moellendorf tackle the distributional
questions climate justice raises, inquiring about which agents should be doing
what to prevent aggravating the problem for future generations and to help
the poor of today deal with the detrimental effects of extreme weather events.
While these are more or less traditional questions, Shue goes to some length
to take into account the insights of climate scientists and politicians to make
his suggestions responsive to the current state of affairs: the realization of the
zero-sum carbon budget, for instance, makes him adjust his ideas on what
exactly the poor are entitled to. Moellendorf wants to transcend what may
otherwise be a merely academic exercise by spelling out the normative com-
mitments underlying existing climate change agreements and policies,
thereby never losing sight of real-world constraints. The principal challenge
this move away from philosophy-as-usual creates is how to leave the ivory
tower without renouncing too many of the necessary philosophical tools to
elucidate the normative problems at hand. Each of the three authors performs
this sensitive balancing act with varying strengths and weaknesses.
Jamieson’s Reason in a Dark Time
Reason in a Dark Time by Dale Jamieson is the least orthodox of the three
unorthodox approaches to climate justice. It begins with our failure to pre-
vent anthropogenic climate change and explores what it would mean to live
“more or less successfully with the changes we are bringing about” (Jamieson
2014, 11; this is also the guiding theme of his subsequent work of fiction,
coauthored with Bonnie Nazdam, Love in the Anthropocene [New York: OR
Books, 2015]).
Chapter 2 provides a rich historical overview depicting the beginnings of
climate science, our budding awareness that climate change is both anthropo-
genic and potentially dangerous, and our failure to act on it. The reader learns
that climate change entered the political stage surprisingly early, with Lyndon
B. Johnson mentioning it in a special message to Congress in 1965, in which
he pointed out the ways in which the then-current generation was altering the
composition of the atmosphere on a global scale (20). Jamieson describes
Karnein
949
how the summit in Rio in 1992 marked a moment of hope for a global resolu-
tion and how these hopes were sorely disappointed in the years that followed.
He maintains that the only factors that have thus far managed to decrease our
global emissions have been global recession, the collapse of communism,
and China’s one-child policy (59), while the major drivers, namely popula-
tion, consumption, and land transformation, continue to increase (60).
Chapters 3–5 explain why we failed. Chapter 3 focuses on how our politi-
cal system is designed in ways that make it difficult to address long-term
challenges, chapter 4 depicts why economists end up being misunderstood as
well as overrated, and chapter 5 argues that our practical reasoning is ill-
equipped to handle the new complexities. Here, in chapter 5, is where the
principal philosophical challenge of the book lies. Nearly nobody, Jamieson
emphasizes, who turns on the air conditioner, gets into their car, or flies in an
airplane has the feeling that they are doing anything morally wrong. But,
according to Jamieson, they are. He attributes our failure to comprehend this
to the evolution of our commonsense morality, the origins of which “are in
low-population, low-density societies, with seemingly unlimited access to
many natural resources” (147). Therefore, “commonsense morality is not
responsive to some important aspects of anthropogenic climate change”
(169). Rather, the problems of climate change “swamp the machinery of
morality, at least as it currently manifests in our moral consciousness” (144).
In response, Jamieson suggests that we can no longer deal with the problems
climate change poses by merely applying our moral judgments or extending
them. We have to revise morality altogether. As radical as this may sound, he
somewhat surprisingly claims that this is exactly what philosophers such as
Henry Shue, who are moralizing actions that lead to climate change, are
doing. They are revolutionaries, whether they know it or not (170).
Is Jamieson right to suggest that our morality can no longer provide...
To continue reading
Request your trial