In her response to my case comment in this issue of Transnational Environmental Law, Laura Burgers purports to disagree with my analysis on two points. Firstly, she suggests that we disagree on the method that a court should use to interpret the duty of care of corporations on climate change mitigation. Secondly, she disagrees with each of the four inconsistencies that I identify in the decision by the District Court of The Hague (the Netherlands) in Milieudefensie v. Royal Dutch Shell. In this rejoinder, I respectfully disagree with her characterization of our disagreement.

In July 1992, nearly two years after the demise of the German Democratic Republic (GDR/East Germany), Erich Honecker, former general secretary of the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) was arrested in Berlin for his complicity in the murder of citizens fleeing his country. Yet his subsequent imprisonment brought forth unexpected help: former SED member Rudolf Bahro, who had been imprisoned by Honecker's regime a decade earlier for publishing a party-critical text, Die Alternative. Bahro wrote to his former jailer on August 17, ironically to offer support for his legal defense. Now, Bahro also expressed hope for a “human understanding … about the substance of our undoubtedly still existing difference of opinion about the path of the GDR” and enclosed his recently published article connecting his support for Honecker with the GDR's founding ideals. In the article, Bahro rejected reducing East German history to the SED's abuses, arguing that “our impulse was conceived with the heart, and no such impulse is ever entirely lost.” That impulse, for Bahro, ultimately emanated from antifascism, its entwined relationship with socialism on German soil, and those who fought for both. Though he acknowledged that “a German revolutionary continuity did not exist en masse” after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, it did survive among the few socialists, like Honecker, who struggled against fascism and “rightly wanted a new German state” after 1945. For his role in building this alternative to capitalism, Bahro argued that Honecker should be allowed to retire in peace.

Why should ‘better than’ be transitive? The leading answer in ethics is that values do not change with context. But this cannot be the entire source of transitivity, I argue, since transitivity can fail even if values never change, so long as they are complex, with multiple dimensions combined non-additively. I conclude by exploring a new hypothesis: that all alleged cases of nontransitive betterness, such as Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion, can and should be modelled as the result of complexity, not context-relativity.

Few events in Imperial Germany's forty-plus years of existence have been remembered with as much pride and hilarity as the one that took place on October 16, 1906. It began shortly after noon, when a man dressed in a captain's uniform appeared on the streets in the northern part of Berlin and commandeered two small contingents of soldiers returning to their barracks from guard duty. Claiming to be acting on instructions from the kaiser himself, the man ordered the ten soldiers to accompany him to Köpenick, a small but growing city on the southeastern outskirts of Berlin. Arriving in front of city hall around 3:30 p.m., he assigned four of the men to take up positions at the three entrances of the building to ensure that no one entered or left without his permission. The remaining troops followed him inside, where he instructed two men to secure the ground floor. Heading upstairs, he encountered an off-duty constable, who, along with other police officials, was given the task of controlling the growing crowd of curious gawkers that had begun to amass in the plaza and streets outside. With these arrangements set, he barged into the offices of the mayor and other top officials, announcing their arrest on the kaiser's orders and stationing soldiers outside their doors. Within an hour, he arranged to have the mayor and city treasurer transported by carriage to the Neue Wache, the main guardhouse in central Berlin. After issuing orders for the remaining soldiers to withdraw at 6:00 p.m., the unidentified captain disappeared into the night with the contents of the city's cash box, totaling 3557 marks and 45 pfennig.