New Working Paper Explores Ethical Dimensions of Global Climate Change Debate

December 18, 2008
by Doug Gavel

The ethical dimensions of the global climate change debate are explored in a new Harvard Kennedy School Working Paper authored by associate professor Mathias Risse. The paper, titled “Who Should Shoulder the Burden? Global Climate Change and Common Ownership of the Earth,” develops a standpoint of “collective ownership” of the earth, and applies it to the distributional questions that arise from addressing the challenges of global climate change.

“Climate change lends itself to a discussion in terms of collective ownership of the earth,” Risse writes. “We cannot simply assume that the harm done through climate change is a wrong. Competition harms people by thwarting their interests, but this does not show any wrong was done. The ownership standpoint helps us understand what wrongs occur in this case. Yet since there has been little interest in that standpoint, there has been no systematic development of its implications regarding climate change.”

Risse concludes that a hybrid approach may be the most fair and effective framework to apply to such a global problem.

“The philosophically most plausible understanding of collective ownership of the earth does not support an equal-per-capita principle, not does it support certain versions of a principle of accountability for past emissions,” Risse argues. “Instead, we end up with a combination of ‘polluter pays’ and ‘ability to pay’ principles to the regulation of access to the absorptive capacity of the atmosphere into whose precise formulation certain aspects of historical accountability will, however, also enter.”

Mathias Risse is associate professor of public policy and philosophy. He works mostly in social and political philosophy and in ethics. His primary research areas are contemporary political philosophy (in particular questions of international justice, distributive justice, and property) and decision theory (in particular, rationality and fairness in group decision making, an area sometimes called analytical social philosophy).

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Mathias Risse

Mathias Risse researches collective ownership of the earth in his new Working Paper.