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Book contents
- Climate Justice and Historical Emissions
- Climate Justice and Historical Emissions
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Climate Ethics, Affirmative Action, and Unjust Enrichment
- 2 Historical Responsibility and Climate Change
- 3 Historical Emissions
- 4 How Legal Systems Deal with Issues of Responsibility for Past Harmful Behavior
- 5 Asking Beneficiaries to Pay for Past Pollution
- 6 Benefiting from Unjust Acts and Benefiting from Injustice
- 7 A Luck-Based Moral Defense of Grandfathering
- 8 In Defense of Emissions Egalitarianism?
- 9 In the Name of Political Possibility
- 10 Right to Development and Historical Emissions
- Index
- References
5 - Asking Beneficiaries to Pay for Past Pollution
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 February 2017
By
Book contents
- Climate Justice and Historical Emissions
- Climate Justice and Historical Emissions
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Climate Ethics, Affirmative Action, and Unjust Enrichment
- 2 Historical Responsibility and Climate Change
- 3 Historical Emissions
- 4 How Legal Systems Deal with Issues of Responsibility for Past Harmful Behavior
- 5 Asking Beneficiaries to Pay for Past Pollution
- 6 Benefiting from Unjust Acts and Benefiting from Injustice
- 7 A Luck-Based Moral Defense of Grandfathering
- 8 In Defense of Emissions Egalitarianism?
- 9 In the Name of Political Possibility
- 10 Right to Development and Historical Emissions
- Index
- References
Summary
It has been suggested that in cases of past pollution, that is, once the original polluters are no longer available, we should resort to asking those who benefited from their pollution to pay towards compensating the harm thereby created. This claim is intuitively appealing. However, in this paper I argue that even if we have no doubt that victims of past pollution need to be helped in their efforts to adapt, the mere fact of having benefited cannot provide the necessary grounds for establishing such obligations. I show that additional factors, such as moral responsibility or wealth, have to be present for benefits to generate obligations to aid. But once these additional factors have been identified, having benefited (alone) appears not to be particularly relevant: what generates the obligations is either moral responsibility or the ability to pay.
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- Climate Justice and Historical Emissions , pp. 107 - 122Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2017
References
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