This is a longer-than-usual guest post from Ruth Makoff, which concerns the framing of the question of the responsibility for preventing more dangerous anthropogenic climate change. 

It seems intuitive that those who are responsible, historically, for climate-dangerous emissions should pay for mitigation against dangerous climate change. This echoes the widely-accepted ‘Polluter Pays’ frame, a central and very-influential principle of green thinking for the past generation. But does this frame actually work, when applied to climate-dangerous emissions? Emissions many of which took place a long time ago; emissions, more crucially, which are not always correlated with ability to pay; and emissions which come from individuals and from the whole economy, rather than just from particular firms (as is the case in paradigmatic ‘Polluter Pays’ cases). Emissions, finally, which are due to the actions of firms, individuals, countries which have undergone huge amounts of change (including quite literally deaths and births) since they took place.

This thinkpiece makes the argument that, counter-intuitively perhaps, historical responsibility is not of primary significance, in assessing who should pay for mitigation of manmade climate change. The frame that should dominate in communications and in policy is, rather, capacity to pay.

Summary of argument

Equity is widely acknowledged[1] to be an essential criterion for an international agreement on mitigating dangerous anthropogenic climate change (DACC). However, there are many competing ideas for how this should be interpreted[2]. Here, I examine one of these; national historical responsibility for causing DACC (henceforth HR), as a principle for equitably distributing national emissions allowances and/or funding global mitigation reductions. After sketching the different forms that HR can take as a principle, I focus on one of its over-riding challenges; the problem of attributing moral responsibility across generations. I examine Gosseries' convincing solution to the problem which makes use of the notion of “transgenerational free-riding”, but argue that its intuitions are only justified with reference to a further principle of equity; Capacity (i.e. That it is Capacity/ability to pay that determines equitably who should pay).[3] The major implication is that, for egalitarians at least, Historical Responsibility is only supplementary to the principle of Capacity. (I note in passing additionally the further way in which HR must be secondary to some no-fault[4] conception of equity. I.e. In order to determine how far any country or group have used excessive emissions in the past, one has to have a prior conception of what a fair use of emissions would look like.)

1. Approaches to Historical Responsibility

Historical Responsibility is often framed as the “polluter pays” principle, which suggests that “those who caused the environmental damage in the first instance have to compensate for it”[5]. This might seem more intuitively to be relevant to the issue of sharing the costs of adaptation - that those most responsible for creating DACC should pay proportionately more of the damages caused by it. And I leave open here that that may well be the case. However, it is has also been considered relevant for equity of mitigation, which is the concern of this thinkpiece[6]. Just as those nations predominantly responsible for DACC should have to pay more of the costs of damages caused, it is often suggested that they should also have to share more of the burden of reducing global emissions, and/or relinquish current levels of access of emissions space, compensating harmed nations by allowing them in turn to take a higher proportion and incur fewer costs.

This primary “polluter pays” interpretation can be subtly distinguished from a further approach to historical responsibility in mitigation which sees the relevance of historical emissions for current emissions distribution as concerned with extending a principle of “equal per capita emissions” over time[7]. This second approach is connected to the idea of ecological debt.[8] Historical responsibility sees the ‘harm’ or ‘debt’ which  has been acquired not just in terms of damages caused by DACC, but harm caused by extremely unequal access to emissions space by nations over a period of time.

Although these two strands may coincide to an extent in some accounts (e.g. Neumayer embraces both as justifications for what he thinks of as ‘historical accountability’), there is a distinction in emphasis. This is between retribution for harms or wrongs in the former and a more straightforward extension of spatial equality across time in the latter, departure from which itself constituted the harm. The former, however, might not necessarily result in, or be motivated by equality in emissions between nations over time.

Both, however, can be conceived of as generally “fault-based”[9] principles in that the present distribution of emissions between countries depends on correcting for harms caused to some nations by others. Accordingly, both are open to the same problem of the transference of responsibility over time. That is, the primary difficulty facing either interpretation is to explain why, given the changing population of a country over time, current inhabitants should be held responsible for the historic emissions of previous inhabitants, and their decisions and practices.

Whilst there are important (and often unnoticed) differences between these two interpretations of historical responsibility, I will not, therefore, argue for the relative merits of either, sympathetic though I am to both[10]. Rather, I focus on the most promising solution to the problem of transference of moral responsibility across generations, which I suggest undermines the relevance of historical responsibility as a distinct conception of the equity criterion. This solution is the “free riding” approach to historical responsibility offered by Gosseries, which cuts across both “polluter pays” and “equality across time” versions of the principle, as I shall explain in section 2. What is significant about this approach is that it in facts brings historic responsibility closer to the “Capacity” principle of equity, as understood, for example, by Baer et al[11]. In fact, whilst Gosseries’ approach is convincing as a solution to the problem of inter-generational moral responsibility, I suggest that its justifying intuitions are better supported by the Capacity principle, although Historical Responsibility might continue to play a supplementary justificational or rhetorical role. In other words: there may be a ‘comms’ role for HR; but it should be limited. Because the key frame that needs to dominate, instead, is Capacity.

2. The problem of moral responsibility between generations (and Gosseries’ solution).

Under both “polluter pays” and “equality across time” interpretations of historical responsibility, compensation of some kind (whether through payment, higher mitigation burden or smaller emissions space) is deemed to be owed by countries with historically high emissions to countries with historically low emissions. The central problem is that those responsible for the emissions in the past are not necessarily the same as those liable for compensation. Whilst there may be some overlap of generations when emissions of the last twenty years are considered, longer intervals have far less overlap. In which case, as Beckerman and Pasek ask, how can current generations be held responsible for a harm committed by others, in this case “earlier inhabitants”? They argue that “The notion of moral responsibility is closely linked to the notion of being a free agent, voluntarily carrying out any act, in knowledge of its consequences. The element of choice is an essential ingredient of moral responsibility.”[12] Neumayer has suggested that this argument would only imply limiting historical responsibility “to a period of the last 50 years or so”[13], but points out that nonetheless, there are many other cases where it is normally morally justifiable to hold groups accountable for the crimes of previous members, such as the complicity of Swiss banks in Nazi crimes[14]. The key question is why this should be so given the absence of causal responsibility for the crime.

Neumayer suggests that this is because “they benefited from the wrongs of the past”[15]. However, the argument is framed somewhat confusingly. In describing why current generations should be held accountable for past emissions, Neumayer says that they “readily accept”[16] the benefits. This is perhaps confusing, since it implies that the moral relevance of benefiting turns on a ‘choice’ to accept the benefits. And whilst Neumayer insists that “It is not about blame or collective moral guilt”[17] and that “this argument does not depend on morally blaming past generations in developed countries for their emissions”[18], the reference to a choice implies otherwise.  This would be a problematic approach since it would be reasonably argued, as Hume similarly argued in opposition to arguments that “tacit consent” justifies governmental authority[19], that for most people dependent on their socio-economic system there is no real choice as to whether to accept this or not.

Axel Gosseries has offered a clearer and more thorough account of why benefiting “from the wrongs of the past” should be morally relevant. He makes use of the notion of “transgenerational free-riding”[20] to argue that “current Americans” have “a moral obligation to compensate current Bangladeshis, even though the former are not morally responsible for their ancestors’ actions”[21]. He imagines a hypothetical “tripartite relationship” between the EU, the US and Bangladesh. If the EU, benefits from trading with the US and the latter has a heavily polluting industry which inflicts costs on Bangladesh, the EU, he argues, should be viewed as ‘free-riding’ on Bangladesh. This is the case even if the EU did not itself undertake polluting activity, because it benefits from activity which harms Bangladesh, which should thereby be entitled to compensation[22]. What is “morally objectionable” about free-riding is for Gosseries, roughly, following Gauthier, that “a benefit from an action” has been obtained “without paying all or part of its cost”[23]. It is not, Gosseries emphasises, relevant whether these benefits have been voluntarily accepted. Ignorance of the costs imposed is also not relevant, since what matters is that a country has benefited from an action imposing costs on another.

It should be noted that there are many more complexities to Gosseries’ argument which I will not examine here but which are worthy of discussion, in particular over differences in how much compensation should be owed by a free-riding nation (which for Gosseries depends on a redistributive or interactive view of free-riding). He also makes some potentially problematic over-generalisations/abstractions which would need to be distinguished to apply the principle in practice. This includes distinctions between costs in mitigation and adaptation, and whether harm is understood in terms of lack of emissions space as well as or instead of damages from DACC. This results in his analysis relying on considering “units of compensation” which assumes the commensurability of different kinds of costs and benefits, but which might not be possible to compare in practice. However, the aspect of the ‘free-riding’ approach which interests me here is its dependence on changes in overall costs and benefits from the harmful action and its relationship to the capacity principle.

3. “Free riding” historical responsibility and the relevance of capacity.

Under the free-riding view of historical responsibility, countries historically more responsible for emissions (setting aside for now the problem of how to determine this[24]) owe compensation to countries harmed by historic emissions if current generations of responsible countries have benefited from them. But, as Gosseries notes[25], it has been argued that “there is a strong correlation between historical emissions and current GNP/capita in various countries. Such a correlation could imply that historical emissions may be regarded as a necessary condition for the current level of GNP/capita in countries like the US”. This means that those countries deemed under the free-riding approach to historical responsibility to be liable for compensation - in terms of mitigation, liable to take the greatest mitigative burden - are also in general the richest countries, which would make them liable to take the greatest mitigative burden under the Capacity principle. The outcomes therefore, seem to generally coincide. This poses the question, which Gosseries considers from Schokkaert and Eyckmans, “do the developed countries have the ethical duty to pay more, just because they are rich, or do they have the duty because they have emitted more carbon dioxide in the past?”[26].

Gosseries’ own response is to suggest that the free-riding interpretation(s) of historical responsibility make justifications based on wealth alone unnecessary, which is the reverse position of Schokkaert and Eyckmans[27]. Perhaps it might indeed be superficially more persuasive to those who are reluctant to embrace an overtly radical egalitarian agenda. But this seems slightly unsatisfactory. It is not simply that the outcomes of both principles seem to be the same. It is that in fact, the intuitions driving the free-riding HR principle at this point are markedly similar to those behind the capacity principle. The Capacity principle is justified by Baer et al because of the current relationship between emissions and wealth/standard of living[28]. They argue that, given the scale of  global emissions reductions now needed, poorer countries will not alone have the capacity to “urgently decarbonize their economies” without threatening development efforts to alleviate poverty, a process which has so far entailed “”dramatic increases in per-capita carbon emissions”[29]. They need not only to decarbonise current activities but to continue improving their standard of living to alleviate poverty, which will require “a vast expansion of energy services” to provide e.g. “clean cooking fuels to escape the epidemic of severe respiratory illness in poor households... electricity... to treat and pump fresh drinking water”[30], and which will make the process of decarbonisation even more challenging.  A global agreement must therefore ensure that those already wealthy countries contribute sufficiently to global mitigation efforts to ensure that “global emergency mobilization [i.e. in reducing emissions] can proceed without stifling development in the South”[31]. And in line with this, for free-riding HR, if a country with historically high emissions does not currently benefit from those emissions (for example, because of subsequent economic collapse - some former USSR states fall roughly into this category), they are not liable for a higher mitigative burden. Both, that is, point to the relationship between emissions and wealth.

It might now be thought that these two principles are two ways of looking at the same solution. However, there is also, in fact, a distinction between them in outcome. Under free-riding HR, any country which is relatively wealthy but with comparatively lesser historical emissions to other countries of similar wealth[32] would owe less compensation or have a lesser mitigative burden than their higher historically-emitting counterparts. Whereas, under the capacity principle, they would be asked to bear an equally high burden because of their equal levels of wealth. Here, a decision would need to be made over whether capacity or free-riding historical responsibility is the dominant concept. I suggest that the Capacity principle better supports the concerns of egalitarians and the drive for “equity” as a criterion in the first place, and should be retained as the dominant equity principle. This is because further reflection reveals that the (free-riding) HR principle is only egalitarian because of historical circumstance, rather integrally to the principle itself, as I shall now elaborate.

On the face of it, demands that historical responsibility be considered as a key part of equity in climate negotiations are clearly at the radical end of proposals, and imply progressive outcomes. To see this, we can look at Gosseries’ rather abstract example of the imaginary “units of compensation” demanded by free-riding HR. Gosseries imagines[33], for the sake of argument, a hypothetical US and Bangladesh, and how the costs or benefits to them of past emissions would translate to compensation between them under free-riding HR (see fig.1):

Fig. 1 (taken from Gosseries, 2003, p25)

The redistributive interpretation requires benefiting countries to compensate losing countries to the point at which both receive equal costs or benefits (in effect neutralising the morally irrelevant “brute luck” of costs/benefits from past emissions), whereas the interactive understanding requires the benefiting country to compensate only to the point at which they incur net cost from doing so. However, the distinction is not central to my argument here so I will not dwell on it. Under either interpretation, the US, which has benefited from past emissions, is required to compensate Bangladesh to a significant extent. Given the historical context of the actual US and Bangladesh, in which the US is wealthy and Bangladesh poor, this is a progressive proposal. But the HR principle itself, as elucidated by Gosseries does not concern itself with the relative wealth of affected countries - it measures only the change in costs or benefits to each country. And this need not be so progressive.

So imagine two other hypothetical countries, Country A and Country B in a two-country world. Country A is significantly richer than Country B - Country A has 100 units of wealth, Country B has 10. Imagine that at time T, Country B begins emitting significant quantities of greenhouse gases - significant enough to initiate DACC whereas country A continues its low level of emissions (which, incidentally, both countries had prior to T, and which were together well below the ‘safe’ level of global emissions).

A century later, at T+100, these past emissions are recognised to be harmful. But they are primarily harmful to Country A and not Country B, and have imposed costs on country A. But whilst these costs[34] have been imposed on Country A, and Country B has been benefiting from emissions, Country A still has 60 units of wealth and Country B has 30. Do we still want to insist that Country B compensate Country A in the way that Gosseries’ principle suggests, under either redistributive or interactive interpretations? This would mean, under the redistributive approach, that Country B would ‘owe’ Country A 30 units of compensation so that they would both have equally suffered or benefitted from the past emissions of Country B, resulting in a net change for both of -10 (see Fig. 2). Under the interactive approach, Country B would ‘owe’ Country A 20 units of compensation, so that County B incurs no net costs (i.e. simply erases the benefits they gained of their past emitting action) , and Country A incurs costs of -20.

Fig. 2

Figure 3 makes clear the distributive implications of such ‘compensation’. Under both redistributive and interactive approaches, the free-riding HR principle has widened inequality compared to the impacts of emitting activity.

Fig. 3.

Perhaps, it might be thought, Country B could choose an alternative way to improve its wealth. But maybe its circumstances do not permit it to do so alone since its levels of poverty make it hard to invest time and money in making the change. In which case, whilst that level of emissions must surely still be limited or they will seriously harm both countries in the long-term, would we insist that within this limit Country B compensates Country A? In particular, in so far as HR is relevant to distributing emissions entitlements would we still insist that Country B transfers some of its emissions space (which, under a descending cap, would already be reduced) to Country A to start emitting more, or to meet most of the costs of reductions for both countries? In such a circumstance I suggest that most egalitarians would sympathise with the plight of Country B and argue that Country A’s better-off situation constitutes a reason for Country A to help Country B to improve its well-being over time such that neither of them need to rely on activities which impose costs on the other. It would not seem to meet the demands of equity to insist that County B compensate a far wealthier Country A – due to, let us not forget, the harmful actions of previous inhabitants of Country B for which current inhabitants are morally responsible only in so far as they have benefited from them - when doing so would significantly widen the equality gap between them, and when the harming actions of Country B were driven by an attempt to reduce poverty.

Of course, this imaginary scenario seems implausible because of the relationship between national wealth and historical emissions. But it serves to draw attention to the aspect of the free-riding HR principle which supports egalitarian instincts - the pre-existing wealth differentials between higher and lower-emitting countries, rather than the mere fact of their historical contribution to emissions. That is, it is only egalitarian in so far as it coincides with the Capacity principle. This turns Gosseries’ point on its head - far from the free-riding HR principle making justifications based on wealth alone unnecessary, the concerns of historical responsibility imply an ethical duty of rich countries to pay more only because they are rich.

Whilst many egalitarians will agree with me in choosing the Capacity principle over free-riding HR (in so far as the principles depart from one another), libertarians such as Nozick would probably disagree. For libertarians, responsibility should be taken for the outcomes which result from choices one has made. Whilst liberal ‘egalitarians’ (sic.) have attempted to accommodate this into egalitarian views on distributive justice by advocating, for example, equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome, those concerned with inequality will be more likely to interpret the hypothetical Country A / Country B scenario as not resulting from choice, but from an existing unfairness. This means that in so far as free-riding HR and Capacity depart in the actual DACC situation there is no straightforward resolution: deciding between them amounts to a fundamental disagreement between conventional egalitarians and libertarians (and some liberal ‘egalitarians’) over the relevance for distributive justice of individual (countries’) responsibility or socio-economic circumstance. It requires a return to fundamental ethico-political debates.

This brings into question climate mitigation proposals that make use of HR as a principle of distributive equity, e.g. even laudable radical proposals such as GDRs (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_Development_Rights).

Whilst I have advocated support of the Capacity principle over free-riding HR, that does not mean the latter has no role to play in practice. Given the degree of overlap in real-world DACC between Capacity and free-riding HR, the latter could be thought of as useful in largely responding to conservative arguments against the Capacity principle which would otherwise criticise the Capacity principle for removing wealth which was justly deserved by richer nations. The latter ‘public-facing’ role for speaking of HR needs however to be handled very carefully, lest it come to be seen as the dominant frame, which would be wrong for the reasons laid out above.

Conclusion

A great deal of attention and emphasis has been placed on historical responsibility as a key factor in arguing for the form of and notionally constructing a just agreement on mitigating manmade climate change. It has been widely assumed that those who are responsible for climate-dangerous emissions should pay accordingly. My argument in this thinkpiece has been that, surprisingly, this is wrong. It is only the correlation – which is not absolute – between emissions and capacity-to-pay that has made the widespread assumption of the centrality of historical responsibility seem plausible. My fig.s above and the discussion of them have shown how this correlation cannot be taken for granted, and that we should focus on capacity-to-pay itself, and not on historical responsibility for emissions, which can be, to put the point just slightly polemically, largely a distraction. In conclusion: We should not rely on HR as a principle of justice in relation to DACC[35].[36]

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