Climate Change and Historical Justice

Janna Thompson (La Trobe University)

Abstract
Climate change is the result of a build up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere beginning from the industrial revolution. Developed countries are largely responsible for this global environmental problem. Developing countries, which will be most seriously affected, have made a negligible contribution. Does increasing the carbon content of the atmosphere count as a historic injustice, and if so what (if anything) do developed countries owe in reparation? This paper concentrates on refuting the most serious objection to the claim that climate change is a historic injustice: namely, that people who didn’t know that they were causing harm can’t be accused of injustice. But if there was no injustice then there is no requirement of reparation. This objection depends on what I will call the ‘culpability conception of injustice’. Historic injustices present challenges to this conception of injustice. Many of those who participated in historic wrongs like slavery or dispossession of Aborigines believed that their actions were justified. I argue that these examples demonstrate that injustices can be committed by unblameworthy people and I show how this reasoning applies to cases where people lack empirical information about the harms they are committing. There is good reason to think that climate change does count as a historic injustice and I will discuss the role that reparative justice can play in moral debates about what should be done.