Moral Reasoning in the Climate Crisis: A Personal Guide

1 Introduction

Despite a growing public consensus that the American government must address the climate crisis, it appears that reducing one’s emissions is not culturally expected in the United States. Even so, when I ask my students whether individuals ought to reduce their emissions, overwhelmingly, they answer positively: in a climate crisis, they insist, you ought to try to do what you can to minimize your consumption-based carbon emissions. A frivolous contribution to significant harm is wrong, and especially so when the potential harm is as great as climate change. Call this the “original intuition.” Yet, upon critical reflection, one might worry the original intuition is groundless. Even among climate activists, there is considerable disagreement about whether we should be concerned about individual emissions at all. This paper’s primary goal is to explore and justify the intuition that frivolous GHG emissions are wrong.

In a well-known paper, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (2005) throws the original intuition into doubt.^[1] He considers an array of moral principles and concludes that none can establish moral obligations against an act of frivolous emitting like joyriding in a gas-guzzler. Sinnott-Armstrong suggests, in closing, that individuals should direct their efforts towards collective climate action rather than keeping their hands green. Call the position that individuals have moral obligations to fight for collective climate action rather than reducing personal emissions “strong climate collectivism.”^[2] Its proponents, therefore, reject the original intuition. Sinnott-Armstrong’s paper prompted a vigorous debate in the philosophical literature between climate collectivists and their critics, who defend the existence of individual obligations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Call the position that individuals have moral obligations to reduce personal emissions (usually alongside collective obligations) “climate individualism.”

Notably, individualist critiques of frivolous emitting transcend background commitments. Kantian deontologists, like James Garvey (2008) and Casey Rentmeester (2010), contend there is an individual duty to reduce emissions that results from the logical contradiction in everyone adopting a policy of living unsustainably. Utilitarians, such as Avram Hiller (2011) and John Broome (2018), empirically contest Sinnott-Armstrong’s claim that individual emissions are harmless in an effort to salvage moral principles that rely on emissions causing harm. Virtue ethicists, such as Marion Hourdequin (2011) and Ronald Sandler (2010), demonstrate how obligations to reduce emissions would flow from a more general moral imperative to live virtuously through the exercise of certain character traits. In what follows, I propose one explanation for this widespread consensus is that all such theorists share the original intuition: a frivolous contribution to a great collective problem is wrong. Yet the vast literature vindicating this intuition has overwhelmingly focused on first substantiating that contributing to a great collective problem is wrong, and only then – if at all – considering the normative implications of its needlessness.

In this paper, I seek to demonstrate that heeding the practical and moral reasons to emit (or, really, the lack thereof) can be as important for grounding the case for climate individualism as evaluating the reasons against. Hence, I aim to show an intuitive moral principle that one has an obligation to act in accordance with moral reasons – a proposition compatible with a plurality of ethical frameworks – can produce moral obligations against frivolous emitting. I call this the “moral weighing principle” or hereafter the “weighing principle.” Accordingly, I intend my approach to be ecumenical: any mainstream ethical framework, regardless of their substantive differences, should be compatible with my premises. This is not however to suggest that all ethical theorists will accept the principle; many will not. Yet, this disagreement stems not from diverging on what moral reasons exist, but rather on how moral reasons work. I suggest that the reason why even normatively diverse ethicists so often condemn frivolous emitting is that they all tacitly accept, like many of my students, the weighing principle that goes most of the way in grounding individual obligations against.

In part 2, I introduce and initially defend the weighing principle. Then, in parts 3 and 4, I make a case that the weighing principle is sufficient to justify climate individualism if you accept two commonly held views: that there are significant moral reasons to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and that in some cases there are no moral reasons to continue emitting. Such are the easy cases. In part 5, I consider the harder cases that arise while exercising practical moral reason in a climate crisis and establish two notable results of taking the weighing principle seriously: (1) that interpersonally evaluating conscious consumption through a range of actions is more promising than litigating discrete actions, and (2) that extensive ethical obligations still exist short of moral purity.

2 The Principle

A pro tanto reason is any reason that has the characteristic of weight (Broome 2004). Analogous to a physical object on a scale, a pro tanto reason counts in favor of Ф, and as long as there are no countervailing reasons in favor of not-Ф, you ought to Ф. Let the scale metaphor guide the reader. Just like a scale, a weighty reason always outweighs a less weighty reason, but many less weighty reasons piled up may match or outweigh such a reason and ultimately “the rational alternative is the one supported by the preponderance of reasons” (Raz 1999, 25–26). Accordingly, many philosophers have accepted something like the following principle:^[3]

Reason-weighing principle: If there is a pro tanto moral reason in favor of Ф, and no sufficiently weighty reasons against Ф, you are required, on the pain of irrationality, to Ф.^[4]

Of course, this principle concerns reasons in general. In this paper, I am concerned with the domain of morality. Moral reasons are, of course, reasons; and so moral reason-weighing will follow the same basic rules. A pro tanto moral reason is any moral reason that has the same characteristic of weight: so long as the moral reason is not outweighed, you morally ought to Ф. Put another way, a pro tanto moral reason all things equal implies a moral obligation: one is morally required, on the pain of irrationality and immorality, to Ф (Gert 2003, 6–7).

This does not necessarily mean that it is irrational to not Ф, full stop. After all, there may be significant countervailing nonmoral reasons that make doing the thing rational, even if morally wrong. Whether moral reasons rationally override nonmoral reasons is an ongoing debate. What is far less controversial however is that moral reasons morally override nonmoral reasons. From the moral point of view, that is, one is morally required to act by the preponderance of moral reasons. I call this the “moral overidingness thesis” (MOT). If one accepts the MOT, the moral weighing principle follows:

Moral weighing principle (or the weighing principle): If there is a significant pro tanto moral reason in favor of Ф, and no sufficiently weighty moral reasons against Ф, you have a moral obligation to Ф.^[5]

As the term “obligation” is associated with deontology, it may invoke a stronger sense of obligation than is intended here. By moral obligation I do not mean anything more full-blooded than “nonoptional, morally speaking.” The other qualities of this obligation remain open, including the moral severity of its violation and the appropriateness of interpersonal blame.

I expect the weighing principle to be highly intuitive, in part because it captures how we all employ moral reason in our everyday lives. When deciding whether to wear a facemask in a pandemic, one might weigh the significant moral reason to reduce the risk of infection to others against the (moral?) reasons to seek out personal comfort. When deciding to offer appreciation for an unwanted gift, one might weigh the significant moral reason to tell the truth against the moral reasons to be thankful. When deciding whether to donate to charity, one might weigh the significant reason to help the desperately needy against the reasons to spend the money on one’s own family. Moreover, such reason-weighing often produces clear obligations: after such deliberation, one might conclude that they are morally required to wear a mask, to tell the truth or to donate some money to charity – because that is what they conclude the moral reasons clearly favor. The weighing principle is useful in that it explains and justifies such instances of practical reasoning, while also offering an action-guiding and context-sensitive prescription for reasoning well.

The weighing principle is also quite flexible: it generates obligations that are entirely dependent on the nature and number of admissible moral reasons. The principle may be permissive or demanding, depending on the number and weight of moral reasons one admits. This is an important point. On its face, the weighing principle looks like another moral principle famously articulated by the philosopher Peter Singer (1972): “If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.” The comparison is well-founded: the weighing principle does entail Singer’s principle, and both ethical principles explain why it would be wrong for you to stroll past a drowning child in a shallow pond if you could save the child by merely getting your clothes muddy. On commonsense morality, the death of a child has significant moral weight, while muddied clothes do not. Therefore, according to the weighing principle, you have a moral obligation to save the child.

However, the similarity between these two principles may already make the reader uneasy. Singer famously argued that leaving the child to drown is morally equivalent to buying nice clothes or vacationing with family while people die from famine and starvation across the globe. In our interconnected world where charitable donations can go a long way to alleviate distant suffering, Singer argues that the moral significance of such personal pleasures pales in moral comparison. Therefore, according to his moral principle, one has a moral obligation to donate their wealth to effective charities until doing so causes more suffering to oneself than it relieves suffering in others. This conclusion stands in extreme tension with commonsense morality, and so – one might think – the weighing principle must be wrong.

Yet, I submit that Singer’s strong conclusion does not follow from the weighing principle, and nor does it necessarily follow from his own principle. Singer’s conclusion further depends on what the moral agent considers “bad” and of “considerable moral importance” – an exercise in reason-weighing. If one accepts Singer’s preferred framework, utilitarianism, then they embrace the moral tenet that maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain constitute the entire set of moral reasons. As a result, it is no surprise at all that a utilitarian employing the weighing principle will arrive at extremely demanding moral obligations. But non-utilitarians are not committed in this way. A non-utilitarian might think that weighty moral reasons exist to establish firm limits on the extent of duties to impartially aid others and may justify this by underscoring the moral significance of interpersonal relationships (Noddings 1984) or personal integrity more generally (Smart and Williams 1973, 99). Plausibly then, such a non-utilitarian employing the weighing principle would not acquire the stringent charitable obligations Singer identifies, even as they are obligated to save the drowning child.

Of course, the literature on Singer’s canonical paper is vast, and I don’t profess to refute his position here. Perhaps he is right any individual equipped with common-sense moral convictions must accept his conclusions. I mean only to dispel the idea it is the exercise of reason-weighing alone that gets him there. The weighing principle, in being so ecumenical, does not logically require Singer’s dramatic conclusion – although perhaps, all things considered, it does. More generally, the argument I advance in this paper does not depend on accepting any particular moral reason or its weight. The critical point for my purposes is that if significant pro tanto moral reasons exist without being counterbalanced, moral obligations follow.

Now, this isn’t to say that the weighing principle is completely uncontroversial. While the principle coheres with popular views of normative rationality that incorporate the reason-weighing principle, not everyone accepts such views.^[6] Others, more narrowly, might reject the MOT. As I’ve said, the MOT is highly intuitive and widely accepted, but it has been challenged. For example, Douglas Portmore (2008) has argued that the MOT is problematic because of its ostensible tension with supererogation, the technical term for acts that are morally praiseworthy but not required.^[7] It is beyond the scope of this paper to navigate this debate, except to note that Portmore’s instinct to reject the MOT comes at considerable theoretical cost, as he acknowledges. If the morally required action can no longer be determined by the weight of moral reasons, then ethical theorists have their work cut out for them (Portmore 2008, 386–387). Simply put, if the moral status of an act can no longer be settled by the preponderance of moral reasons, then things get considerably more complicated. On the one hand, this could be good news: more work for philosophers to do. On the other, abandoning the MOT entails significant theoretical and practical revision that many will find unattractive and (contra Portmore’s argument) unnecessary. Rather than abandon the MOT, such theorists might reject the category of supererogatory acts or explain how the MOT and supererogation might coexist.

In any case, such controversy should not distract from what makes the weighing principle immune from disagreements surrounding other moral principles that have so animated the individual climate responsibility literature. In being so generic and abstract, the weighing principle could be accepted by any moral theory within which reason-weighing generates moral obligations. That describes every moral theory I’m familiar with. Ultimately, every ethical theory can accept the weighing principle because the principle does not concern what reasons there are but rather how reasoning works. This is, again, what I mean when I said the principle is ecumenical.

This brings me to the first contribution I hope to make in this paper. I contend that disagreements about whether individuals are required to reduce their emissions not only have to do with disagreements regarding what reasons there are, but also with a more fundamental disagreement about the connection between reasons and requirements. I show in the next section that those who accept the weighing principle are committed to climate individualism; as a corollary, strong climate collectivists are committed to rejecting the weighing principle. As I’ve hoped to show, the weighing principle is highly useful and intuitive. Therefore, at the very least, the climate collectivist must accept more theoretical baggage than they acknowledge.^[8]

3 The Case for Climate Individualism

Do individuals have moral obligations to reduce their GHG emissions? As I suggest in the introduction, commonsense morality seems to answer yes. Adherents to climate individualism affirm this reply. Yet, commonsense morality should not always be trusted.^[9] Those who resist the climate individualist position tend to do so on the grounds that climate individualism is problematically elitist, condescending and obscures the true culprits of anthropogenic climate change. No relevant player in this debate rejects individualism on the basis that climate change is not happening or is greatly exaggerated. Rather, public critics often insist that a focus on private action conveniently plays into the agendas of fossil fuel companies by convincing private citizens that climate change is their fault and that it can only be solved by turning moral censure to each other rather than corporations or governments.

Moreover, critics say, climate individualism dangerously obfuscates the problem at hand. The focus on reducing private emissions ignores the reality that just 100 companies are responsible for 71 % of global emissions, as reported by a Carbon Majors Report (Heede 2019); or that the 20 largest oil companies are responsible for about a third of carbon and methane emissions since 1965, as found by the Carbon Accountability Institute (Doyle 2011). Given fossil fuel corporations’ outsized responsibility for the current climate crisis, it is perhaps no surprise that British Petroleum played a major role in popularizing the concept of the personal carbon footprint in the early 2000s, a tactic that served to turn attention back to ordinary individuals. In a global context where targeted misinformation can rapidly inform public opinion, a healthy dose of skepticism towards personal intuition on this matter is completely reasonable.

The relative inconsequence of individual private GHG emissions not only encourages environmental writers and climate activists to emphasize holding institutions and governments accountable for climate action (Lukacs 2017; Wallace-Wells 2019), but also has prompted a notable wave of climate ethicists to dismiss the climate individualist position (Cullity 2015; Johnson 2003; Kingston and Sinnott-Armstrong 2018; Sinnott-Armstrong 2005). All such authors take, as a starting point at least, that individual GHG emissions do not cause morally significant harm to present or future people because of how miniscule an individual’s GHG emissions are compared to the scope of the climate problem. This might be called the problem of inconsequentialism (Sandler 2010). Skeptics then, in their own ways, argue that there exist no other moral grounds for deeming individual GHG emissions morally impermissible.^[10] These two claims, taken together, entail that no individual moral obligations exist to reduce emissions. As an alternative, all these authors contend that individuals have moral obligations to engage in collective climate action, which they can meet through voting, protesting and the like. Hence, call this family of views strong climate collectivism: they affirm the collective at the exclusion of the personal.^[11]

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is a particularly influential climate collectivist and in part provoked the now substantial literature on individual climate ethics when in 2005 he argued that there are no individual moral obligations of any kind to refrain from emitting a reasonable amount of GHGs into the atmosphere.^[12] Consider his description of carbon emitting that he defends in his paper.

My example [of individual GHG emitting] will be wasteful driving. Some people drive to their jobs or to the store because they have no other reasonable way to work and eat. I want to avoid issues about whether these goals justify driving, so I will focus on a case where nothing so important is gained. I will consider driving for fun on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. My drive is not necessary to cure depression or calm aggressive impulses. All that is gained is pleasure: Ah, the feel of wind in your hair! The views! How spectacular! Of course, you could drive a fuel-efficient hybrid car. But fuel-efficient cars have less ‘get up and go.’ So let us consider a gas-guzzling sport utility vehicle. Ah, the feeling of power! The excitement! (295–296)

For my purposes, I am not all that concerned with this instance of wasteful GHG emitting (an act that has been so scrutinized by other philosophers that it has been given its own name, joyguzzling). Instead, I am more interested in what, more generally, it seems Sinnott-Armstrong was trying to prove with the example. Notice how the driver guzzles only because that is what they want to do, despite the presence of easy alternatives. Sinnott-Armstrong even allows that the guzzler could have used a more fuel-efficient vehicle but didn’t feel like doing so. The vital point? By defending the moral permissibility of joyguzzling, Sinnott-Armstrong is providing a moral defense of all individual GHG emitting, frivolous or otherwise.

Therefore, to refute strong climate collectivists such as Sinnott-Armstrong I must show only that some individual acts of emitting are impermissible. To do so, I first establish that there are significant moral reasons against individuals emitting GHGs into the atmosphere. I provide two arguments for this conclusion. First, I appeal to the diversity of compelling moral reasons that have been identified in the philosophical literature up to this point. Second, I argue that the existence of moral reasons to reduce personal emissions is necessary for the coherency of morally praising individuals who take steps to reducing emissions. Let us take each in turn.

First, I wish to return to a point I raised in the introduction: climate ethicists have defended individual moral obligations to reduce carbon emissions on myriad ethical grounds. The problem of inconsequentialism presents the central challenge to climate individualism, and so individual climate ethics tends to orbit around this issue. There are two broad strategies climate individualists employ to answer the problem of inconsequentialism, which I have elsewhere called denying the description and affirming the prescription (Obst 2023a). The former tactic attempts to refute the empirical collectivist claim that individual mitigation efforts make no morally significant difference to dangerous climate change. Most often, this individualist strategy involves arguing that individuals pose a morally significant expected harm to present or future people through their discrete or lifetime emissions (Broome 2018; Hiller 2011; Nolt 2011). Collectivists, in reply, tend to question the mechanisms that substantiate this expected harm or suggest that even if individual emissions pose expected harm that it does not amount to moral significance (Kingston and Sinnott-Armstrong 2018, 180; Cullity 2019, 27). This debate turns upon the empirical details of an extremely dynamic and ultimately little-understood global climate and so, in my judgement, has resulted in somewhat of a stalemate. This said, I would suggest this indeterminacy favors the climate individualist. If there is doubt as to whether your personal emissions cause harm, reasonable precaution dictates one err on the side of caution.

The latter tactic, by contrast, attempts to sidestep the problem of inconsequentialism entirely by arguing that moral obligations exist to reduce emissions even if it turns out that these efforts do not make a direct difference to climate harm. Ronald Sandler (2010) has pointed out that the problem of inconsequentialism threatens individual responsibility on a great range of environmental issues. Yet, he argues that the moral reasons to exercise various character traits can explain the wrongness of behavior like tossing litter alongside the road, walking across a prairie restoration project or guzzling gas. Even if it cannot be shown that such acts cause harm, they may still be inconsistent with the exercise of proper virtues such as integrity (Hourdequin 2010, 450), respect for nature (Jamieson 2010, 440) or compassion (Knights 2019, 532). Alternatively, some philosophers argue that the wrongness of such anti-environmentalist actions lies in their contribution to or complicity in harmful outcomes (Kutz 2000; Nefsky 2017), or in their capacity to communicate to others that bad environmental behavior is acceptable (Bernstein 2023; Hourdequin 2010). In a different tack, Christian Baatz has argued that carbon dioxide emissions are now a scarce good and therefore have become subject to rules of fair allocation (Baatz 2014; Baatz and Voget-Kleschin 2019). As affluent individuals in developed nations, at least, are already well over their equal-per-capita share of the remaining carbon budget, there are significant moral reasons grounded in fairness for them to restrict their personal emissions.

As is evident, climate individualists have offered many significant and mutually reinforcing moral reasons for individuals to reduce their personal emissions. If any of these arguments establish a significant moral reason to reduce emissions, then my argument can proceed. Moreover, even the staunchest climate collectivists tend not to deny the existence of significant moral reasons to restrict personal emissions. Instead, they usually only deny moral obligations to reduce emissions. For example, in their paper, Kingston and Sinnott-Armstrong (2018) establish that they “do not deny that there is a pro tanto moral reason to refrain from joyguzzling, assuming that not all reasons are requirements” (170). This admission is important, as it allows them to preserve the possibility that it may be “morally better, best, ideal or virtuous to refrain from joyguzzling” (170). They are willing to make such concessions because they do not think there is any important connection between moral reasons and moral requirements in the climate context, but this is exactly the assumption that the weighing principle troubles.

This all brings me to my second point: for it ever to be reasonable to morally praise those who go to significant lengths to reduce their personal carbon footprint, there must be significant moral reasons in favor of doing so. If there were no moral reasons to conserve, after all, it would make little sense to call individual reductions in emissions morally praiseworthy. In fact, if moral reasons existed to reduce personal emissions, but these reasons were trivial, moral praise likewise would be silly. Of course, the climate collectivist could simply bite this bullet, but they do so at their peril. To insist that morality has hardly anything to say at all about one’s individual contributions to a global environmental crisis the size of climate change – to insist that people cannot even be morally praised for doing what they can to keep their hands clean – is, by my estimation, sufficient to warrant reductio ad absurdum rebuttal. Therefore, the question becomes which, not if, significant moral reasons against emitting GHGs exist.

If I’m right on this, my case for climate individualism is nearly closed. If one accepts the moral weighing principle alongside any significant moral reason to reduce personal emissions, then it follows individuals have moral obligations to reduce their personal emissions unless there are sufficient countervailing moral reasons that justify doing otherwise.^[13] So, the final claim I make is that very often there are not countervailing moral reasons that justify individual emitting. This general question has been broached in the philosophical literature most often by scrutinizing particular cases of emitting such as the example of joyguzzling. Recall that this example is contrived to be an overwhelmingly trivial instance of emitting. This feature of the example made Sinnott-Armstrong’s position so provocative, but it also severely diminishes the moral reasons in favor of it. Assuming the weighing principle, then any significant moral reason to reduce emissions generates an obligation to refrain. Hence, joyguzzling constitutes one impermissible instance of individual emitting; the strong climate collectivist position is false.

Now, one might object that even if the preceding argument refutes the climate collectivist position, it does so only by technicality. Perhaps “joyguzzling” is so contrived as to be artificial. In everyday life, there are no such clear instances of low-cost emitting. On the contrary, individuals emit greenhouse gases overwhelmingly for significant, and therefore excusing, moral reasons: to commute to work, to provide substance for one’s family, to pursue their cherished life projects. In reply, it first must be acknowledged that it is implausible to contend that all or even most emissions are released for good reasons. This is because, as has been pointed out elsewhere, there are a multitude of quite common GHG-emitting behaviors that either would be easy or personally advantageous to abandon (Schwenkenbecher 2014, 179–182; Raterman 2012, 432–433; Hedberg 2018, 171). These might be called “low hanging fruit” reductions. Consider the choice to leave the light on in a vacant room, to let the water run when brushing one’s teeth or to again and again use a disposable cup instead of a single coffee mug. Such choices are needless and silly as they seem to bring either no benefit at all or even detriment to the emitter. Accordingly, regardless of the moral theory you favor, I think it is safe to claim that there are not sufficient moral reasons to engage in these habits. As a result, the weighing principle creates moral obligations to inspect such wasteful behavior and, acting on the balance of moral reason, abandon them.

At this juncture, it’s worth clarifying that trivial cost needn’t mean trivial impact. While it is true that almost all of the most effective changes an individual can make to reduce their carbon footprint are ostensibly high-cost (never driving, never flying, not having a child), the benefits of reducing trivial-cost actions and habits are not, themselves, trivial. While upgrading lightbulbs are the least impactful carbon reduction action you can make according to an influential study (Wynes and Nicholas 2017), it’s nonetheless true that an earlier report by the US Department of Energy found decorative Christmas lights in the United States alone to surpass the national electricity consumption of many developing countries including El Salvador, Ethiopia and Tanzania (Conroy et al. 2008). One lesson to take from this statistic is that less impact does not mean low impact, and certainly not a trivial one. Those Christmas lights accounted for just 0.2 % of the United States’s total emissions, but also could run 14 million refrigerators (Moss and Atansah 2015).

We should also be wary of too narrowly construing frivolous emissions. For one, there is a rich intellectual tradition spanning from Plato to Henry David Thoreau of questioning the connection between material consumption and happiness – a philosophical outlook that is now bolstered by ample psychological evidence (Andreou 2010). For another, recent data shows that the richest top 0.1 % of the world’s population emitted 10 times more than all the rest of the richest 10% – a cohort comprised of billionaires and multimillionaires who regularly “joyguzzle” in super-yachts and private jets. Most, if not all, of these luxury emissions are clearly frivolous in that they could be abandoned without a meaningful reduction in quality of life. The same can surely be said to a lesser degree for many of the activities of those in the middle and upper class of developed countries.

Still, such clear cases do not entail that moral reasoning about individual emissions is easy, nor that I have settled how it always ought to be done. On the contrary, the ethics of individual emitting are often strikingly complex. I consider this issue thoroughly in the next section. Nevertheless, the three points I have defended so far are together sufficient to establish the (weak) climate individualist position. If (P1) the weighing principle is true, (P2) there exist significant moral reasons to reduce individual emissions, and (P3) there are opportunities for trivial-cost reductions, then there are at least some examples of individual emitting that are morally impermissible. In fact, they are (at least) as common as wasteful emitting is today. That is just another way to say that individual moral obligations to reduce GHG emissions are currently abundant.

4 Moral Reasoning in a Climate of Corruption

In the first half of this paper, I provided an ecumenical case against frivolous emitting. Such are the easy cases; there is still much more we might learn about practical moral reasoning in a climate crisis by taking the weighing principle seriously. In this section, I consider two separate issues: first, the lingering worry about demandingness when otherwise “frivolous” emitting is reduced across one’s whole life and how this may pertain to the appropriateness of interpersonal blame. Second, the problem of self-serving moral reasoning and how this might condition creeping corruption.

5 Conclusion

I have presented the following argument: if (P1) the weighing principle is true, (P2) there exist significant moral reasons to reduce individual emissions, and (P3) there are opportunities for trivial-cost reductions, then there are many examples of individual emitting that are morally impermissible. By introducing the weighing principle to the individual climate ethics literature, I have also suggested that much of the ongoing debate has been incomplete, if not misdirected: individual climate responsibilities may depend more on one’s view of how reasoning works than on one’s commitment to any specific moral theory. Moreover, I wrote this paper to prompt the individual climate ethics literature to finally move past the question of whether individual obligations to reduce emissions exist and encourage them to turn to the much more important task of considering the extent of these obligations. I am not alone in calling for this shift (Fragnière 2016) and happily there are papers that have been and are being written on the topic. I hope part 5 has contributed to this important, and more substantive, discussion.^[17]

Finally, I wish to clarify if it’s not yet clear that the individualist position does not require a robust empirical account of how individual emissions directly harm others, in just the same way that the collectivist position does not require a robust empirical account of how individual activism contributes to collective outcomes. While deontologists and virtue theorists may be especially taken by the myriad pro tanto moral reasons independent of direct harm, consequentialists should also be open to the salience of such concerns. For instance, Dale Jamieson (2007) has argued that it behooves the consequentialist in environmental contexts to attend to character rather than the direct impacts of discrete acts. If so, it seems clear that the quality of temperance, fairness, integrity, mindfulness, and so on would offer significant moral reasons to skip that flight or filet mignon. Therefore, the consequentialist might think that reducing GHG emissions is less morally significant than engaging in more efficacious collective action – or even less significant than making the people around them tangibly happy – and yet still acknowledge frivolous emitting is wrong.^[18] Recognizing the weighing principle helps clarify why.

In this vein, I would like to offer an olive branch to the climate collectivist. Even if the problem of inconsequentialism does not refute the climate individualist position, it nevertheless does make clear the pressing ethical importance of collective action and structural transformation. Moreover, as Judith Lichtenberg (2010) points out, structural changes – such as legal restrictions on carbon-intensive behaviors or subsidizing renewable energy – not only can make a much larger climate impact than a single individual but also can reduce the research and mindfulness costs of meeting one’s individual moral obligations. The better the structures, the less weighty the reasons there will be to emit greenhouse gases; and so, the better the structures, the more individual obligations there will be to conserve. Flying is much more replaceable when high-speed rail is available. Accordingly, the pressing need for public regulation and infrastructure change should be made all the clearer.

In the end, rejecting a highly useful and intuitive moral principle like the weighing principle may be tempting in the interconnected, complex and highly unjust world we find ourselves in, but this temptation should be resisted. Instead, we ought to embrace the singular challenge of doing right in such a world and regard one another with humility when we fall short. All the while, we must not forget the justified moral censure we will deserve from the people who fall victim to our new harms if we fail. Let it motivate us to not disappoint them.