Causation, Responsibility, and Climate Change

Abstract

This thesis presents a framework for understanding moral responsibility in the context of climate change. After reviewing existing literature on responsibility, the author argues for a forward-looking approach that takes collectives as primary bearers of responsibility. This framework is grounded in the interventionist framework of causation, which allows for a better understanding of the ways in which our actions can intervene in the complex causal relationships underlying climate change. The author proposes a new kind of agency, known as an intervention agency, that is necessary for the ascription of intervention responsibility. Additionally, the author provides an account of intervention strength using resources from the interventionist theory of causation and causal emergence. The author also argues that coarse-grained modelling can provide a useful tool for understanding the ways in which collective agents have more capacity to intervene in these causal relationships than individual agents. The author emphasizes the importance of different kinds of justice as generators of responsibility, rather than as grounds. The thesis concludes by acknowledging that while the framework provided in this thesis is useful for understanding moral responsibility, further work is needed to formalize and evaluate the proposed notion of responsibility more precisely, as well as to address the normative aspect of intervention responsibility. The author hopes that this thesis will contribute to the growing field of climate ethics and encourage recognition of our individual and collective responsibilities to mitigate the effects of climate change.