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Climate Change, Social Justice and Development

Development Aims and scope

Abstract

Terry Barker, Şerban Scrieciu and David Taylor discuss the implications of climate change for social justice and the prospects for more sustainable development pathways. They state that the analysis and discussions surrounding the climate change problem, particularly those drawing on the traditional economics literature, have relied on a crude economic utilitarianism that no moral philosopher would endorse. Such arguments have typically ignored the concept of justice itself and wider ethical considerations. The authors argue that climate change is inherently inequitable and inevitably raises ethical issues. Climate change policy should therefore be informed by moral philosophy relating to scientific findings with respect to climate change impacts, rather than just informed by economics in isolation. Climate stabilization policies should be designed by international negotiation to support development and they should not jeopardize the prospects for the well-being of the poor.

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Notes

  1. http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo.html.

  2. We adopt a ‘new’ approach to economics (Boulding, 1992), which places more emphasis on social choice and development (see Barker, 2008, for a discussion). ‘Economics is the study of social activity undertaken with its primary purpose the expectation of reward, which usually involves money, the motivations of such activity and its consequences, both good and bad’ (Barker, 2008: footnote 5). In contrast, the neoclassical economist Robbins (1932: 16) defined economics as ‘the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses’, asserting that economics is a value-free science.

  3. However, climate mitigation implies dealing with conflicting interests, since businesses and economies dependent on fossil fuels may suffer as emissions are drastically curbed for the sake of future generations. Many of these future people will be poor and vulnerable, but many others will be more affluent than the present generation, which is the one we are asking to make sacrifices. In other words, when interests conflict, the message in ethics is likely to be mixed (Broome, 2008).

  4. The north–south developed–developing dichotomy has lost some of its significance for climate change policy negotiation with the emergence of affluent social groups within the developing countries. Internationally, the poorest and most vulnerable countries with low emissions are applying pressure to large, developing, fast-growing economies, such as China, India and Brazil, to curb their soaring emissions.

  5. The value of the pure rate of time preference can make an order-of-magnitude difference to the monetized costs of climate change, with high rates of 1.5–3 percent a year as advocated by Nordhaus (2007) reducing far-ahead damage costs to negligible present values. Broome's view of the pure rate of time preference (considering only the futurity of later generations) is supported by the utilitarian philosophers Henry Sidgwick and R.M. Hare and by the anti-utilitarian John Rawls. All of them argue that a rate above zero cannot be justified ethically (Rawls, 1971: 259–262; Hare, 1981: 100–101; Sidgwick, 1906).

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Diana Liverman and Julie Nelson for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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Discusses the implications of climate change for social justice and the prospects for more sustainable development pathways

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Barker, T., Scrieciu, Ş. & Taylor, D. Climate Change, Social Justice and Development. Development 51, 317–324 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2008.33

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