Book Review: Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming World by John Broome (original) (raw)

2014, Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal

John Broome's Climate Matters is a timely, elegant, and accessible book. His book is deliberately interdisciplinary, as is much of his work in moral philosophy more generally. The discussion of what should be done, and by whom, to prevent the adverse effects of climate change is informed by many years of philosophical engagement with economic theory, especially problems arising in the conceptualization and technical implementation of cost-benefit analysis. The central arguments in the book are informed as well by a longstanding engagement with climate change science. Broome brings to bear a perspective forged in the work of his role as a lead author-and occasional critic-of the report of Working Group III of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. At the heart of the book is a somewhat unconventional thesis regarding the way we should view the moral division of labor between nation-states and individuals in mitigating the serious harm produced by climate change. Roughly, Broome's thesis is that nation-states primarily have impersonal duties of beneficence-duties to bring about good consequences-while individuals have duties of justice, which on Broome's account are largely negative duties, or duties not to cause severe, avoidable harm to specific, identifiable others. There are, of course, critics who deny that the distinction between the domain of justice and the domain of beneficence is as conceptually sharp or as normatively significant as often supposed. Indeed, Broome concedes some lack of sharpness but asserts that the normative difference is real (50). In particular, Broome's claim is that "governments have a stronger moral mandate to make things better," especially for their own citizens (188), but such duties are impersonal, or ones that are not owed to particular people (530). By contrast, the "key defining feature" of duties of justice is that they are owed to particular people who have rights not to be harmed (52). Many of Broome's claims regarding the distinction between beneficence and justice are not developed in much philosophical detail even though it