Climate Change and Individual Responsibility

Abstract

How much harm does a single individual act, such as an afternoon pleasure ride in a gas-guzzling car, cause with regard to its effects on climate change? None, according to Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, who argues that there is thus nothing wrong with doing so, since such acts are too small to make any difference.1 Sinnott-Armstrong's detailed argument encapsu lates a lot of common thinking about the effects of small-scale individual actions in a very large world. As Ronald Sandler puts it, a person's entire lifetime impacts on any longitudinal collective action problem is likely to still be inconsequential.2 On this view, most or all common in dividual actions, and even full individual lives, are too causally insignificant to make any difference with regard to climate change. I shall call this the claim of individual causal inefficacy, (ICI). As Sinnott-Armstrong writes, Global warming and climate change occur on such a massive scale that my individual drive makes no difference to the welfare of anyone.3 In this paper, I argue that ICI is false not just for its claim about whole human lives but even for its far weaker claim of the incfficacy of single individual actions, such as a Sunday drive. I claim that it fails for two main reasons. First, if individual actions such as Sunday drives are not causes of climate change, then what does cause climate change? The cause would have to be some metaphysically odd emergent entity. Second, an expected (dis-)utility calculation shows that individual acts do make an expected difference, and one that is not insignificant. My argument becomes quite general about the many ways in which people fail to account properly for potential harms of actions where the causes are many and the effects are indirect. Since this is a common phenomenon, I discuss several possible explanations of why it is difficult for people to grasp individual moral responsibility with regard to global phenomena. I will use two unargued-for assumptions (along with Sinnott Armstrong). First, I assume that there will be (or, that given our current state of knowledge, it is epistemically likely that there will be) anthro