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"Achieving climate justice is increasingly recognized as one of the key problems associated with climate change, helping us to determine how good or bad the effects of climate change are, and whether any harms are fairly distributed. The numerous and complex issues which climate change involves underline the need for a normative framework that allows us both to assess the dangers that we face and to create a just distribution of the costs of action. This collection of original essays by leading scholars sheds new light on the key problems of climate justice, offering innovative treatments of a range of issues including international environmental institutions, geoengineering, carbon budgets, and the impact on future generations. It will be a valuable resource for researchers and upper-level students of ethics, environmental studies, and political philosophy"--Provided by publisher

Achieving social equality has been an important aim of modern democratic societies. Yet the process has engendered debate about the nature of equality and the consequences of its application. Why is equality valuable? What kind of equality should be aimed for? When is inequality justified? Should a principle of equality apply globally? The book assesses and links the different dimensions of equality and asks whether recent writing on the topic has the philosophical substance and political force traditionally associated with egalitarian thought.

Intro -- Climate Change and Social Justice -- Contents -- Contributors -- Foreword -- Introduction -- Part I Science, Fairness and Responsibility -- 1 The Blame Game -- 2 Climate Change as an Ethical Issue -- 3 Climate Justice -- 4 Climate Change and Intergenerational Equity -- 5 Some Distributional Issues in Greenhouse Gas Policy Design -- 6 Just Carbon Trading? -- Part II Climate Change and Vulnerable Groups -- 7 Justice and Adaptation to Climate Change -- 8 Primary Health Care Responses to Climate Change -- 9 Climate Refugees and New Understandings of Security -- Part III Policy Implications -- 10 Climate Justice -- 11 More than Just Money -- 12 Equitable Climate Policy in a Dangerous World -- Index

Divestment from companies that produce or heavily utilize fossil fuels has become one of the biggest issues in the contemporary moral debate surrounding climate change. Universities and other institutions are being asked to divest themselves of their fossil fuel–related investments. In this article I argue that, while the case for divestment is morally strong, not all of the arguments used to support divestment are equally strong. Moreover, which of these arguments is employed matters a great deal for the strength of the conclusions regarding divestment. There are two major groups of arguments: what I call positive arguments for divestment, which stem from the claim that divestment is a response to general duties to take action to prevent dangerous climate change, and what I call negative arguments, which stem from a duty not to cause harm. In this article I will briefly characterize what divestment means and to whom it applies. I will then look at negative and positive duty accounts of the duty to divest before looking at the standard objections to both. Objections have tended to cohere around the claims that divesting is inconsistent, useless and/or harmful, or should be abandoned for better options to avoid dangerous climate change.

AbstractThis article considers the philosophical foundations of preference‐based and capability approaches to well‐being. I argue that standard preference‐based approaches face difficulties in providing a satisfactory account of well‐being and that the capability approach, developed by Amartya Sen, offers a superior account. In particular, I argue that subjective preference accounts of well‐being are philosophically difficult to sustain and utilise in a public policy context.

The consequences of Foucault's work for political theory have been subject to much reinterpretation. This article examines the reception of Foucault's work by the left of politics and argues that the use made of his work is overly negative and lacks a positive political dimension. Through a discussion of the work of Judith Butler and other interpreters of Foucault I argue that the problem facing the poststructuralist left is formulated in a confusing and unhelpful manner, what I will call the 'dilemma of the left libertarian'. Once we get around this formulation of the problem a more progressive political response becomes possible. I end by discussing the political possibilities of Foucault's work in terms of an account of autonomy derived from Foucault's later work on the Enlightenment. KEY WORDS: Foucault, Butler, Autonomy, Politics, Ethics, Critique, Left, Conservative, Rorty, Habermas

Welfare schemes which require recipients of benefits to 'give something back' are often justified in terms of 'fairness' or fulfilling the 'social contract'. The Australian Government's recent and proposed changes to unemployment benefits through the Mutual Obligation Scheme appeal to both justifications. However, insufficient attention has been paid the underlying ethical and political assumptions — a serious deficiency. given their role in legitimating harsh new penalties. There are two broad reasons the current trend to tie benefits to obligations is inappropriate. First, the unemployed have little choice about their contract. And second, there is insufficient mutuality shown towards the unemployed for the Scheme to be obligation‐generating. Rather than being a means of encouraging participation or mutuality, the Scheme is essentially punitive.

Introduces an edited Vol on how Michel Foucault's later works may be seen to respond to problems standardly associated with his thought. Foucault's later work is periodized as beginning with The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1976) & his development of the notions of biopower & governmentality. While these concepts were developed most explicitly in a discussion of sexuality, they were intended to refer to the domains in which individuals constitute themselves as subjects in the dual sense of the term. It is suggested that Foucault's later thoughts on these subjects initiated several conceptual changes in his theories, including his ontology of freedom & power. Moreover, these new conceptual resources offer a great deal to contemporary theorists who wish to defend his thought against standard criticisms, eg, he leaves no foundation on which to offer a social critique of society, & tends to overestimate the extent to which individuals are constituted by power relations. D. Ryfe

John Rawls intends to describe a political conception of justice that does not depend on comprehensive doctrines, but only on traditions rooted in Western democratic cultures. Moreover, citizens in a society governed by this conception will recognize it as just because they possess two moral powers, defined as the capacity to have a conception of the good & the ability to understand a public conception of justice. This notion of the political subject is similar to that of Michel Foucault, in that both thinkers conceive of subjectivity in relation to some outside force: for Rawls, moral & intellectual powers; & for Foucault, a regime of power. However, Foucault's notion of governmentality, in which subjects internalize power relations & so subjugate themselves, contradicts Rawls's notion of autonomy. Whereas Rawls conceives of a subject's two moral powers as innate, Foucault suggests that such powers are conditioned by the regimes of power within which they are produced. Thus, it is concluded that Foucault's model of the acting subject is more sensitive to relationships of power & their impact on the development of autonomy than Rawls's theory of justice. D. Ryfe

"In Climate Justice Beyond the State, Lachlan Umbers and Jeremy Moss argue that states' failures to take action on climate change have important implications for the duties of the most important actors states contain within them - sub-national political communities, corporations, and individuals. Virtually every figure in the climate justice literature agrees that states are presently failing to discharge their duties to take action on climate change. Few, however, have attempted to think through what follows from that fact. States contain many other agents who are all, in their own right, important actors with respect to climate change (in particular, sub-national political communities, corporations, individuals). Were the states to which these agents belong to adopt adequate emissions-reduction policies, there would be few interesting questions concerning such agents' duties. They would simply be required to comply with the relevant policy's demands. A fully adequate climate policy, after all, would be one which took on an appropriate share of the global burden of responding to climate change, and distributed the costs of doing so fairly among the various agents internal to the state. The failure of states to impose such policies, then, gives rise to the question this book seeks to answer: what are the moral duties of sub-national political communities, corporations, and individuals where the states to which they belong fail to take appropriate action to address climate change? Targeted at academic philosophers working on climate justice, this book will also be of great interest to students and scholars of global justice, applied ethics, political philosophy and environmental humanities"--