Ethics of coordination and climate change

Climate change represents a challenge which is both theoretically and practically perplexing. In particular, it is unclear who has a duty to do what with respect to climate change. Many authors consider climate change a collective harm problem.

A collective harm problem involves many individuals acting in a way that leads to serious harm, where each individual’s contribution is negligible. However, a convincing ethics addressing collective harm problems has yet to be formulated. Moreover, it is contested whether individual contributions are indeed negligible.

The purpose of our project is to address the challenges from climate change by developing a comprehensive ethics of coordination, which can readily be applied not only to climate change but to collective harm problems in general.

The aim is to show that individuals have not only direct duties to avoid causing harm, but also duties to coordinate their actions – duties that derive from the (expected) effects of individuals acting together.

We shall do so by answering the following research questions:(1) Are individual duties to act without co-ordination sufficient, using climate change as a test case?(2) How can the two most promising co-ordination approaches be justified, taking the challenges from climate change into account?(3) Can the two approaches be combined, using climate change as a test case?