Historical Emissions and free riding.
(2004) Justice in Time: Responding to Historical Injustice — p. 355-382, published
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- Abstract
- Should the current members of a community compensate the victims of their ancestor’s emissions of greenhouse gases? I argue that the previous generation of polluters may not have been morally responsible for the harms they caused. I also accept the view that the polluters’ descendants cannot be morally responsible for their ancestor’s harmful emissions. However, I show that, while granting this, a suitably defined notion of moral free-riding may still account for the moral obligation of the polluters’ descendants to compensate the current victims of their ancestors’ actions. A concept of trans- generational free-riding is defined. Objections to the idea of using free-riding as part of a theory of justice are rejected. Two different views of moral free-riding are contrasted, with consequences for the amount of compensation to be exigible from the polluters’ descendants. Some final considerations are devoted to the possible relevance of this free-riding-based view for other issues of historical injustice.
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Citations
Gosseries, A. (2004). Historical Emissions and free riding. In L. Meyer (ed.) (ed.), Justice in Time: Responding to Historical Injustice (p. p. 355-382). Nomos. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/98740