Ethics, Policy & Environment

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Climate Sins of Our Fathers? Historical

Accountability in Distributing Emissions Rights

David R. Morrow

To cite this article: David R. Morrow (2016) Climate Sins of Our Fathers? Historical
Accountability in Distributing Emissions Rights, Ethics, Policy & Environment, 19:3, 335-349, DOI:
10.1080/21550085.2016.1226240

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Published online: 02 Sep 2016.

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 Ethics, Policy & Environment, 2016
VOL. 19, NO. 3, 335–349
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21550085.2016.1226240

Climate Sins of Our Fathers? Historical Accountability in

Distributing Emissions Rights
David R. Morrow
Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

ABSTRACT
One major question in climate justice is whether developed countries’
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historical emissions are relevant to distributing the burdens of

mitigating climate change. To argue that developed countries should
bear a greater share of the burdens of mitigation because of their
past emissions is to advocate ‘historical accountability.’ Standard
arguments for historical accountability rely on corrective justice.
These arguments face important objections. By using the notion of a
global emissions budget, however, we can reframe the debate over
historical accountability in terms of distributive justice. This paper
argues that, given two defensible assumptions, distributive justice
requires historical accountability. These assumptions are that the
proper claimants on the emissions budgets are societies or states,
not individuals, and that we should be allocating the entirety of the
original, pre-industrial budget, rather than just the remainder.

1. Introduction
The sovereign states of the world agreed nearly a quarter century ago that they have ‘com-
mon but differentiated responsibilities’ to ‘achieve … stabilization of greenhouse gases in
the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with
the climate system’ (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 1992). They
have made limited progress, though, in stabilizing greenhouse gas emissions, much less
reducing them. One stumbling block that has obstructed negotiations is a disagreement
over the significance of historical emissions. Debate over this issue has typically framed the
problem as one of corrective justice or, less plausibly, retributive justice. Thinking of the
problem in terms of the global emissions budget reframes the problem as one of distributive
justice. I argue that under certain defensible assumptions, the distributive justice framing
requires developed nations to take responsibility for their historical emissions.
The crux of the problem is that previous generations of Britons, Germans, Americans, and
other now-wealthy peoples dumped large quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmos-
phere—far more, both absolutely and per capita, than previous generations in places like
China, India, Brazil, and other developing countries. As a result, many residents of developing
countries advocate ‘historical accountability’ or ‘historical sensitivity’ in distributing the costs

CONTACT  David R. Morrow  dmorrow2@gmu.edu

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 336    D. R. Morrow

of mitigation and adaptation. For the purposes of this paper, I interpret the call for historical
accountability as the following claim about what certain countries deserve:
historical accountability

In virtue of their greenhouse gas emissions prior to some specific year, historically high-emitting
countries deserve to shoulder a greater share of the burdens of mitigation and adaptation than
they would based purely on ‘ahistorical facts’ about those countries after that year.
This principle is intentionally vague in various ways because different commentators endorse
different versions of it.
The most obvious vagueness concerns the year that divides ‘historical’ from ‘contempo-
rary’ emissions. The most frequently mentioned dividing line in the philosophical literature
is 1990, the year that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its
first report. The usual justification for this choice is that the IPCC’s report eliminated any
excuse for policy-makers’ ignorance of the issue. Other commentators define historical emis-
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sions differently—e.g. as those between 1950 and 1990 (Posner & Weisbach, 2010), those
between 1990 and 2005 (German Advisory Council on Global Change [WBGU], 2009), and
so on. Nothing in this paper depends on any particular definition of historical emissions, but
for ease of exposition, I will follow the bulk of the philosophical literature in treating ‘historical
emissions’ as those prior to 1990.
Another key point of vagueness concerns the term ‘historically high-emitting country.’
This could be defined, for instance, as any country with above-average cumulative pre-1990
emissions or as any country with cumulative pre-1990 emissions above a certain threshold.
Another ambiguity involves the distribution of burdens within the class of historically
high-emitting countries: Should each such country bear a larger burden than they otherwise
would? Or would it be enough for those countries to do so collectively? I will not resolve
these ambiguities here; my argument should work for any plausible interpretation of the
principle.
By ‘ahistorical fact’, I mean, roughly, a fact about a country’s present state or its expected
future, as opposed to facts about what that country did or was like in the past. Because the
principle permits reference to any ahistorical fact that is true after 1990 (or whatever refer-
ence year is chosen), it implicitly allows reference to trends, cumulative emissions, etc. after
that year. The point is to exclude current facts about, e.g. a country’s cumulative emissions
since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. This exclusion matters to the present argu-
ment because it means that two prominent principles for distributing the burdens of miti-
gation do not satisfy historical accountability: in particular, neither ‘Ability to Pay’ principles
nor ‘Grandfathering’ principles count as historically sensitive on this definition. Ability to Pay
principles distribute burdens in accordance with the ability to pay, usually measured in terms
of GDP per capita as of some relatively recent reference date, such as 2005. Since the ability
to pay is strongly correlated with past emissions, this yields a distribution in which high-emit-
ting countries bear a greater per capita burden than other countries. Since ability to pay
depends on (more or less) current income levels, however, such a distribution is not histor-
ically sensitive in the relevant sense; historically high-emitting countries are not paying more
in virtue of their past emissions. Grandfathering principles require each country to reduce
its emissions by a certain percentage from some base year, such as 1990. Carl Knight describes
grandfathering principles as those on which past emissions ‘increase entitlements to future
emissions’ (2013, p. 410). His main argument for ‘moderate grandfathering,’ however, is that
 Ethics, Policy & Environment   337

currently high-emitting countries have large carbon-intensive infrastructures, and so face

very high transition costs in the short to medium term. These costs, he argues, generate a
greater claim on emissions rights in the short term than they would otherwise have (Knight,
2013, 2014). Knight’s position and his justification for it, however, rely only on facts about
the country after 1989. Thus, grandfathering does not count as historically sensitive on this
definition. One theoretical motivation for excluding these principles from the class of his-
torically sensitive principles is that, in principle and sometimes in practice, they treat coun-
tries with very different historical emissions records as equivalent. For instance, Germany
and Australia have roughly identical per capita incomes, but Germany’s cumulative historical
emissions are much greater than Australia’s. Similarly, France and South Korea had roughly
similar aggregate annual emissions in 1990, but France’s cumulative historical emissions are
greater.
Historical accountability has proven controversial—and not just among the devel-
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oped-country politicians and businesses who might be expected to object to it, but even
among some Anglophone ethicists and political philosophers. In the next section, I discuss
the two principles that commentators have suggested as justifying historical accountability,
along with the major objections to using those principles in that way. In §3 of the paper, I
briefly explain the notion of a global emissions budget and argue that it enables us to frame
the debate over historical accountability as a matter of distributive justice. In §§4–5, I defend
two assumptions that jointly entail that distributive justice requires historical
accountability.

2.  The Dialectical Impasse over historical accountability

The standard arguments for historical accountability rely implicitly on corrective justice.
Thinking about climate justice in terms of corrective justice is controversial, however, because
climate change differs in salient ways from typical cases of corrective justice. The corrective
justice-based debate over historical accountability has therefore come to something of a
dialectical impasse. My goal in this section is not to show that corrective justice-based argu-
ments must fail—only that they remain mired in controversy.
Corrective justice is, speaking loosely, that part of justice that concerns setting past injus-
tices aright. Although philosophers and legal scholars disagree about how exactly to under-
stand corrective justice, they generally agree that when one party wrongfully harms another,
corrective justice requires at least that the first party must compensate the second party, as
when someone who damages another’s property must pay to repair that property. It may
also require that the first party suffer some further loss or punishment, such as a punitive
fine, as retribution. Retributive justice is therefore a part of corrective justice (Roberts, 2002).
One standard argument for historical accountability appeals to the Polluter Pays Principle,
which states that those who pollute ought to bear the costs of (cleaning up) that pollution.
Developed countries have emitted most of the carbon so far; they are the polluters. By doing
so, this argument goes, they have harmed the developing countries—both by causing some
warming that has inflicted and will inflict harm on developing countries and by putting the
developing countries in a position where they can pursue their own development only at
the cost of causing further dangerous climate change. Thus, justice requires that in virtue
of their past emissions, the developed countries must bear the costs of mitigation as a way
of compensating for those harms.
 338    D. R. Morrow

Critics of this argument raise three main points. First, prior to 1990, developed countries’
inhabitants and policy-makers were excusably ignorant of the bad effects of greenhouse
gas emissions. Thus, they were not morally culpable for harming the developing countries
(Baatz, 2013; Bell, 2011; Caney, 2009; Page, 2011; Posner & Weisbach, 2010; Schüssler, 2011).
Second, even if the persons, corporations, etc. who emitted those greenhouse gases were
morally culpable for doing so, the vast majority of them are now dead or defunct, and their
descendants do not inherit their guilt (Bell, 2011; Caney, 2006; Halme, 2007; Posner &
Weisbach, 2010). To put that same point somewhat differently, since states do not have the
right kind of collective responsibility for their inhabitants’ (past) actions, requiring the present
inhabitants of developed countries to pay for their forebears’ pollution amounts to punishing
them for the climate sins of their fathers (Bell, 2011; Caney, 2006; Halme, 2007; Posner &
Weisbach, 2010).
These objections would be decisive, in my mind, if the argument were about retributive
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justice, but it is not. The argument is one of corrective justice more generally, which makes
some of the objections harder to evaluate. Corrective justice requires compensation for
‘wrongful harms’ in a fairly technical sense; whether past generations’ excusable ignorance
means that their harms were not wrongful in the relevant sense requires careful argumen-
tation. The offending parties are dead or defunct only if the defending parties are persons
and corporations, rather than states—a point to which I will return later. Thus, while the
Polluter Pays Principle may justify historical accountability, its application is at least
controversial.
To avoid that controversy, some commentators have appealed to the Beneficiary Pays
Principle, which states that those who benefit from some act of pollution should bear the
costs of that pollution. Since the inhabitants of developed countries have benefited from
historical emissions far more than the inhabitants of developing countries have, goes this
argument, the former ought to bear the costs of mitigation. One objection to this principle
is that it neither coheres well with the Polluter Pays Principle nor serves as a plausible replace-
ment for that principle (Caney, 2006).1 Some authors invoke the non-identity problem, dis-
cussed most famously by Parfit (1984) in the context of harming future persons, to suggest
that historical emissions did not actually benefit any particular persons, since the persons
who currently enjoy the benefits of historical emissions would not exist had their ancestors
not industrialized (Caney, 2006; Halme, 2007). Others object that it is difficult or impossible
to distinguish the benefits from historical emissions from the benefits from other historical
activity, and that it is therefore impossible to determine how much anyone has benefited
from historical emissions per se (Page, 2011; Posner & Weisbach, 2010).
These arguments clearly concern corrective justice. This means that some of the argu-
ments against appealing to the Polluter Pays Principle apply here, too. In particular, if past
generations did not wrongfully harm the developing countries, then justice cannot demand
compensation from the beneficiaries of their emissions.
The objections to these principles have not swayed everyone. Other commentators have
offered rebuttals of many of these objections (Gardiner, 2004; Neumayer, 2000; Pickering &
Barry, 2012; Soltau, 2009; Vanderheiden, 2008). Without prejudice to the strength of those
rebuttals, I will simply note that they have failed to satisfy the critics of corrective climate
justice. The debate over historical accountability stands at an impasse, due largely to the
difficulties of applying corrective justice in what Gardiner (2011) calls the ‘perfect moral
storm’ of climate change. Approaching the topic through a different lens may prove more
illuminating.
 Ethics, Policy & Environment   339

3. Historical accountability and the Emissions Budget

The popular ‘emissions budget’ framing of mitigation policy provides a more helpful way to
think about historical accountability. Viewed through this lens, the question is one of distrib-
utive justice rather than corrective justice. In this section, I sketch an argument—to be fleshed
out in later sections—that distributive justice demands historical accountability in allocating
the emissions budget.

3.1.  The Global Emissions Budget

Climate ethicists and others writing about climate justice often frame their discussions in
terms of a ‘global emissions budget’ or a ‘global carbon budget’ (Blomfield, 2013; Broome,
2012; Caney, 2012; Grasso, 2012; Meyer & Roser, 2006, 2010; Shue, 2011; Tremmel, 2013;
WBGU, 2009).2 Roughly, the emissions budget is the total amount of carbon that humanity
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can emit before the effects of our collective emissions exceed some threshold of accepta-
bility. There is much to say about how to define that threshold, but one commonly used
threshold is a likely increase in global average temperature of 2 °C over the pre-industrial
average. Using this standard, humanity could emit roughly 700 additional gigatonnes of
carbon (GtC) before making it more likely than not that global average temperature will rise
by more than 2 °C (Collins et al., 2013, p. 1113). Humanity emitted approximately 500 GtC
between 1870 and 2011 (Collins et al., 2013, p. 1113). Although there are important argu-
ments for setting a much lower threshold, some emerging arguments for a higher threshold,
and some arguments that the threshold may need to be re-evaluated from time to time, I
will assume for the sake of this paper that the budget stands at no more than 700 GtC, and
that it stood at about 1200 GtC around the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Neither
the precise size of the budget nor the basis for determining its size will matter to this paper’s
main argument.
Under the emissions budget framing, instead of asking who should bear the costs of
mitigation, we ask what share of the emissions budget each claimant should have—that is,
how to distribute the emissions budget. The debate over historical accountability, then,
becomes a debate over whether historical emissions affect how much of the remaining 700
GtC each country deserves.
Under certain assumptions, narrow distributive justice entails historical accountability. By
‘narrow’ distributive justice, I mean that the question is specifically about the justice of the
distribution of emissions shares, holding constant the distribution of other goods, rather
than about the distribution of wealth or well-being in general, of which emissions shares
are one component. This departs from the ‘integrationist’ approach advocated by Caney
(2012), in that it does not attempt to derive the just distribution of emissions rights from an
ideally just global distribution of all relevant goods. It also departs from the isolationist–wel-
farist approach adopted by Meyer and Roser (2010), which concerns itself with distributing
the welfare-related benefits derived from emissions rights, in isolation from the actual global
distribution of other goods. Briefly, the narrow distributive justice framing is better than
these alternatives because it is more theoretically and politically tractable. It is more theo-
retically tractable because we need not settle thorny questions of global distributive justice
or the nature of welfare in order to settle questions about the distribution of emissions rights.
It is more politically tractable, in that we need not tie negotiations over emissions rights to
 340    D. R. Morrow

negotiations about all other goods—though negotiators could tie emissions rights to specific
other goods, such as funds for climate adaptation, if doing so proved helpful.
Narrow distributive justice requires historical accountability if (1) the claimants on ‘emis-
sions shares’ are transgenerational entities, such as societies or states, rather than individuals
and (2) we are retroactively distributing the ‘original budget,’ as it stood at the beginning of
the industrial revolution, so that historical emissions constitute ‘consumption’ of a society’s
share of the emissions budget.3 Call these the ‘Transgenerational Claimants’ assumption and
the ‘Original Budget’ assumption, respectively.
A simple example shows why these two assumptions are jointly sufficient for making
historical accountability a requirement of narrow distributive justice. Consider how much of
the remaining emissions budget should be allocated to Japan. For any principle of distrib-
utive justice, retroactively allocating emissions shares would require allocating some quantity
of emissions—say, n tons—to Japan out of the original 1200 GtC budget. Japan’s remaining
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share, then, is simply n minus however many tons Japan has emitted since the beginning
of the Industrial Revolution. Thus, Japan’s share of the emissions budget is reduced in virtue
of its historical emissions; had it emitted less before 1990, it would have a greater share of
its original allocation remaining.
Neither assumption, however, is sufficient on its own. If the Transgenerational Claimants
assumptions were true but the Original Budget assumption were false—that is, if states are
the proper claimants on the emissions budget but we were only allocating the remaining
budget—then we would need some kind of corrective justice-based argument to show that
historically high-emitting states should receive less of the budget in virtue of their historical
emissions. (Note, however, that granting the Transgenerational Claimants assumption under-
mines an important objection to the Beneficiary Pays Principle. Thus, granting that assump-
tion but rejecting the Original Budget assumption might still justify historical accountability,
just not as a matter of distributive justice.) On the other hand, if the Original Budget assump-
tion were true but the Transgenerational Claimants assumption were false—that is, if we
were allocating the original budget, but allocating it to, e.g. individuals instead of transgen-
erational entities—then past persons’ emissions would affect each present person’s emissions
quota equally. This would spread the burdens of mitigation equally across historically high-
and low-emitting countries.
In the following sections, I present a series of arguments for these two assumptions.
One might think, with Henry Shue, that the emissions budget framing allows us to dodge
questions about historical accountability altogether, and that reading further is therefore a
waste of time. One would be wrong. Shue argues that since each person is entitled to emit
(at least) as much carbon as is necessary to satisfy his or her basic needs, and that the sum
of those ‘subsistence emissions’ exhausts the remaining emissions budget, historical account-
ability never comes into play (Shue, 2011). As an all-things-considered judgment about how
the remaining emissions budget ought to be divided, Shue may well be right. But historical
accountability is about desert, and from the perspective of desert, it may be that giving res-
idents of the developed countries deserve so little of the remaining budget that giving them
what they need, as Shue proposes, means giving them more than they deserve.4 If that were
the case, developing countries would have a stronger case that the developed countries
ought to provide additional funds for adaptation—that, in effect, the developing countries
ought to sell the developed countries emissions rights that, purely from the perspective of
desert, rightfully belong to the developing countries. So, even if considerations of need fully
 Ethics, Policy & Environment   341

determine how to allocate the remaining emissions budget, it is still important to determine
whether developed countries will be getting more than their fair share in that allocation;
and doing that requires determining whether to account for historical emissions in deter-
mining each claimant’s fair share.

4.  Societies as the Claimants on the Emissions Budget

In the previous section, I argued that narrow distributive justice requires historical account-
ability if two assumptions are met. In this section, I defend the Transgenerational Claimants
assumption—viz. that the claimants on ‘emissions shares’ are transgenerational entities rather
than individuals. In particular, I offer three arguments that societies, for which states are
reasonable though imperfect proxies, are the proper claimants on the emissions budget.
This is not to say that societies may not or ought not to establish ‘personal quotas’ for each
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of their members. Rather, it is to say that allocations should initially be made to states, and
that, thereafter, one state’s (over)consumption of its allocation does not affect the amount
that any other state is allowed to emit.
These arguments rest (or could rest) on distinct normative premises. Perhaps few people
will accept all the premises that might support each argument. The point of offering these
arguments is to provide a wide range of normative starting points that lead to historical
accountability.

4.1.  The Social Choice Argument

The first argument is the Social Choice Argument. The key premise of the Social Choice
Argument is that each individual’s carbon footprint is significantly affected by social choices
over which that individual has very little control. A ‘social choice’ is, roughly, any choice
between two or more states of affairs that will obtain for each member of society.5 For
instance, choosing a head of government is making a social choice. The citizens of the United
States must choose a single president; they cannot each choose their own. Social choices
are usually, though not necessarily, made collectively, which is why individuals typically have
very little control over them.
Social choices affect individuals’ emissions in two ways. First, if emissions are to be allo-
cated to individuals, then every ton of emissions must be assignable to some individual(s).
Many emissions, however, result from the activity of collective entities, such as states or
corporations. Consider, for instance, the United States military’s emissions. The average
American has very little control over the level of the U.S. military’s emissions. Yet, if those
emissions are to be assigned to specific persons, they are presumably to be spread (more
or less) evenly across all Americans. Second, social choices about the structure of a society
greatly affect the emissions-related impacts of an individual’s choices and the cost or feasi-
bility of low-emission choices. For instance, the carbon footprint of the food in one’s local
grocery store depends on a wide array of social choices about agricultural policy, interna-
tional trade policy, governmental and private support of highways versus railways, and so
on. The carbon footprint of one’s home depends on social choices about energy policy, urban
planning policy, and so on. Therefore, the same actions—e.g. buying fruit at your local gro-
cery store, cooling your home with an electric air conditioner, commuting to work, etc.—will
contribute more or less to one’s carbon footprints depending on the choices that your society
 342    D. R. Morrow

has made. Low-carbon choices, such as buying local produce or commuting by public trans-
portation, are more expensive or more onerous in some societies than in others.
To the extent that one’s carbon footprint is a function of social choices that are beyond
any individual’s control, it is unfair to hold each individual directly responsible for the full
size of his or her carbon footprint. The responsibility belongs more properly to the society
as a whole. Therefore, emissions shares ought to be allocated to societies, rather than to
individuals.

4.2.  The Emissions Thief Argument

The second argument is the Emissions Thief Argument: Suppose that emissions shares were
initially allocated to individuals, either directly at the international level or indirectly via initial
allocation to states, who would then allocate their quotas to individual citizens. When an
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individual emitted more than his or her allotted share, leaving a smaller share for everyone
else, from whose share should we subtract that excess? Roughly, we can divide the plausible
answers to that question in two: We could subtract the ‘stolen emissions’ from humanity as
a whole by subtracting some amount from the emissions shares of every individual living
at or after the time of the ‘theft.’ Or we could subtract the ‘stolen emissions’ from (some subset
of ) the ‘thief’s’ society. Each answer admits of numerous variations, but some version of the
latter answer is better than any version of the former. This is partly for forward-looking,
consequentialist reasons and partly for backward-looking, deontological reasons.
The forward-looking problem with subtracting the stolen emissions from humanity as a
whole is that it would exacerbate the collective action problems that drive climate change.
The benefits of emission-intensive activities tend to stay predominantly within the society
of the persons performing them. (The strongest argument for this is an indirect one: the
countries that have emitted the most have grown the most. If the economic benefits from
fossil-fueled economic activity of, say, 19-th century Britons did not stay primarily in Britain,
it would be hard to explain why the early industrializers are so much richer than the rest of
the world, why China has grown so much more than India, etc.) If the cost of stolen emissions
were distributed equally across the globe, then a society of emissions thieves would keep
most of the benefits of their theft while paying only a fraction of the costs (in terms of
reductions of their own shares because of their compatriots’ emissions thieving). Thus, each
society would have an incentive to encourage emissions theft. This strengthens the ‘pessi-
mistic,’ tragedy of the commons-based model of climate change (Gardiner, 2011).
The backward-looking problem is that subtracting the stolen emissions from humanity
as a whole would be unfair because it would penalize all persons equally for an act that
benefits some more than others. Subtracting the stolen emissions from the thief’s compa-
triots, on the other hand, would force those who receive the benefit to bear the costs. This
sub-argument relies on the same intuition that motivates the Beneficiary Pays Principle: if
a costly action benefits one person rather than another (or at the other’s expense), the
beneficiary ought to bear the cost of that action (including the costs borne by the person
who was harmed).
In light of these problems, stolen emissions should be subtracted from (some subset) of
the thief’s society. Especially for those who accept the Social Choice Argument, the best
option (from the standpoint of an international climate treaty, at least) is to subtract the
stolen emissions from the society as a whole, rather than from some proper subset of the
 Ethics, Policy & Environment   343

society.6 If, however, the stolen emissions are subtracted from the society as a whole, then
emissions are effectively distributed over societies, not individuals. This is because the total
size of a society’s emissions budget is fixed, even if individual members of the society exceed
the ‘personal quota’ allotted to them by their society.
Formally, then, the Emissions Thief Argument is as follows: Emissions shares should be
allocated either to individuals or to societies. If it were the case that they should be allocated
to individuals, then, given the best way of dealing with ‘stolen emissions,’ they should be
allocated in a way that is functionally equivalent to allocating shares to societies. Thus, either
way, emissions shares should be allocated to societies.

4.3.  The Reasonable Pluralism Argument

The third argument is the Reasonable Pluralism Argument. It rests on the premise that different
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societies might reasonably disagree about what constitutes a just distribution of emissions
shares within a society (either at a particular time or over time), and that when two societies
choose different reasonable distributions for themselves, emissions shares ought to be allo-
cated within that society in accordance with each society’s chosen distribution. If an inter-
national treaty allocated emissions rights directly to individuals, this would override each
society’s prerogative to decide for itself how to distribute emissions rights within the society.
It is also unclear from a practical perspective how an international treaty could reach so
deeply into domestic politics as to establish a personal quota for each individual; but the
point is that, even if it were possible, it would be undesirable. Therefore, an international
climate regime ought to allocate emissions rights to societies rather than to individuals.

4.4.  An Objection to the Transgenerational Assumption

Even if we accept that societies are the relevant claimants on the emissions budget, we might
raise the following objection: States are flawed proxies for societies. These flaws are so serious
that we ought not to allocate emissions rights to states as a way of allocating them to soci-
eties. But from the perspective of an international climate treaty, there is no better proxy for
societies. Thus, it is infeasible for an international climate treaty to allocate emissions rights
to societies or to any reasonable proxy for societies. We should therefore allocate emissions
rights to individuals.
The basic premise of this objection is correct: states are flawed proxies for societies, for a
variety of reasons. For instance, many states arguably contain two or more distinct societies.
The most obvious examples are indigenous peoples in the Americas who constitute sover-
eign nations, despite lacking their own states. Indigenous peoples in other countries settled
by European colonists, such as Australian Aborigines and the Maori of New Zealand, are also
good examples. Other candidates may include culturally distinct separatist groups, such as
the Quebecois or the Basques. Even drawing up a list of such societies would be controversial,
highlighting the vagueness of the term ‘society,’ but it is presumably not impossible.
Furthermore, state borders have changed significantly over time, usually in ways that do not
reflect underlying expansion, division, or contraction of societies. The most important exam-
ples are the former Soviet republics (Caney, 2006; Tremmel, 2013). How, for instance, should
we account for emissions from Kiev under Soviet rule? What share of those emissions should
 344    D. R. Morrow

count against Russia’s quota, and what share against Ukraine’s? Such questions are hard—
though presumably not impossible—to answer.
It is true, then, that allocating emissions rights to states is a kind of ‘rough justice’—that
is, a rough approximation of ideal justice. But given the preceding arguments for the
Transgenerational Assumption, allocating emissions rights to individuals would also consti-
tute rough justice: it would amount to ignoring the injustices associated with the moral luck
of being born into a society that has made low-carbon lifestyles easy (hard, inevitable, etc.),
with emissions thieves, and so on. There simply is no feasible way to achieve an ideally just
distribution of emissions rights. The challenge for someone who would press this objection
about flawed proxies, then, is to show that the imperfections of distributing emissions rights
to states are more serious than the imperfections of distributing them to individuals.
Another response to this objection is to insist that the last move is too quick: there are
other transgenerational entities to which we might allocate emissions rights, and so the
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infeasibility of allocating rights to societies does not imply that we should allocate rights to
individuals. In particular, we might allocate them directly to states, which are transgenera-
tional entities. The three arguments presented in this section all apply, more or less, to states
as well as societies. The chief disadvantage in allocating emissions to states is the fact that
some societies—especially indigenous peoples—are not adequately represented by any
state. But regarding states as direct claimants on the emissions budget would still amount
to accepting the Transgenerational Assumption, and so we need not choose between states
and societies for the purposes of this argument.

5.  The Original Budget Assumption

What reasons might we have for accepting the Original Budget assumption from §3—that
is, that we should be allocating the ‘original’ emissions budget, as of the beginning of the
industrial revolution, rather than just the remaining budget?
The main argument for this assumption begins from the premise that the principles of
distributive justice apply even when people do not realize that they apply. For instance, if a
sailor, shipwrecked in a strange place, lays claim to an acre of land, he is not entitled to keep
it when his fellow survivors discover that they are all marooned on an island barely larger
than an acre. The principles of distributive justice—whether Lockean, egalitarian, or other-
wise—still bind the sailor, even when he does not realize that he has overstepped them.
The relevant application of this premise is that the principles of distributive justice that
determine a claimant’s maximum claim on an exhaustible common pool resource already
applied to the atmosphere’s absorptive capacity even when those claimants did not recog-
nize that capacity as exhaustible. Thus, if the Transgenerational Claimants assumption is true
and so many of the claimants on the emissions budget extend back in time to the beginning
of the industrial age, then each claimant already faced some limit on how much of the
emissions budget each claimant could consume. The relevant question is therefore what
the principles of justice implied about the proper allocation of the original, pre-industrial
emissions budget.
There are two reasons to accept the starting premise of this argument. First, denying it
would mean that ignorance of the grounds for applying some principle of justice would
excuse injustice. By averting our gaze from anything that might alert us to the relevance of
justice in some particular case, we could wriggle free of the demands of justice. Second,
 Ethics, Policy & Environment   345

denying the premise with respect to common pool resources, in particular, would create
perverse incentives. In situations where a resource may be exhaustible—and the case of the
emissions budget suggests that we are often ignorant of which resources are exhaustible—
anyone with the capacity to exploit that resource would have an incentive to consume or
appropriate as much of it as possible as quickly as possible. For each individual user, con-
suming the resource slowly risks having its use curtailed if someone discovers that the
resource is exhaustible. Assuming that the best principles of justice would minimize perverse
incentives, we therefore have a strong reason to accept principles that apply even when
people do not realize that they apply.
Philosophers with a Rawlsian bent might object that this argument violates the require-
ment that principles of justice be publicly known.7 Very roughly, the Rawlsian ‘publicity
condition’ requires that everyone know what principles of justice apply to them. The argu-
ment for the Original Budget assumption might seem to deny this. Closer consideration,
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however, reveals that this is not the case. Rawls expresses his ‘publicity condition’ by saying
that ‘everyone will know about these principles [of justice] all that he would know if their
acceptance were the result of an [explicit] agreement’ (Rawls, 1971, p. 133). Thus, the con-
dition demands only that everyone know which principles apply to each kind of situation.
It does not require that everyone know which specific situations belong to which type. By
analogy, consider the kind of the health insurance contract that was, until recently, common
in the Unites States, in which insurers were not required to cover treatment for ‘pre-existing
conditions’—that is, medical conditions that predated the signing of the contract. The insurer
and the insured both know what rules the contract establishes; those rules are public. But
when the insured files a claim for treatment, the insurer does not necessarily know whether
the condition being treated is a pre-existing condition. That is, the insurer lacks some empir-
ical information that is necessary to know which rules apply to the situation at hand. The
same kind of empirical ignorance is at work in the argument for the Original Budget assump-
tion. Thus, the objection from the publicity condition fails.
A related objection appeals to what John Simmons calls ‘rug-pulling’ (Simmons, 2010, p. 20).
Following (Sidgwick, 1907/1981), Simmons warns against ‘pulling the rug’ from beneath some-
one—that is, undermining their legitimate expectations by changing the rules on which the
person has based some important long-term plans. To do so, Sidgwick and Simmons contend,
is sometimes to treat people unjustly. Rug-pulling is unjust, Simmons argues, because it causes
losses and suffering that ‘may often be both considerable and seem unfair to those who had
little choice but to rely on the future being like the past’ in the relevant respects (Simmons,
2010, p. 21). Strictly speaking, the argument for the Original Budget assumption does not involve
changing the rules. Rather, the argument involves discovering that a particular situation is
governed by a different ‘section’ of the same set of rules than we had previously believed. But
it does involve a serious violation of people’s legitimate expectations that the future will resem-
ble the past: people and polities make plans for the use of their resources based on their expec-
tations about their future access to those resources. Unexpected disruptions to that access can
cause significant losses and suffering. In the case of the emissions budget, Western societies
have structured their entire ways of life around carbon-intensive activities, reasonably expecting
that they would be able to continue such activities for many decades to come. They have
invested enormous amounts of money in physical capital, from fossil fuel-burning power plants
to airports and highways, whose usefulness (currently) depends on emitting greenhouse gases.
They have consumed much of the atmosphere’s absorptive capacity frivolously, unaware that
 346    D. R. Morrow

emissions could be frivolous. Most Western societies would certainly have done things differ-
ently had they known that their cumulative emissions were limited. To insist now that they have
spent most or all of their emissions budget is to pull the rug violently from beneath them.
Sidgwick provides the reply to this objection: when alleviating one injustice requires
rug-pulling, those who suffer as a result deserve some compensation—even if it is impossible
to decide exactly whom to compensate and how much to compensate them, except ‘by a
rough practical compromise’ (1907/1981, III.v.3). In terms of the emissions budget, this means
granting the developed countries a larger share of the emissions budget than would be
justified if the sudden imposition of a budget constraint did not harm them. To acknowledge
the justice of such compensation, however, does not undermine historical accountability or
the Original Budget assumption. It simply adds a complication: we are to retroactively dis-
tribute the Original Budget, with the understanding that we must account for the harms
that developed countries would suffer by receiving an allocation that is close to or less than
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their current cumulative emissions.

A third objection, based on a Lockean conception of justice, would undermine the Original
Budget assumption. A Lockean might argue that the principles of justice do apply even when
no one realizes it, but that the principles governing common pool resources entail that past
emissions are ‘water under the bridge.’ On this view, common pool resources are initially
unowned. People (or societies) appropriate resources, roughly, by using them. In the climate
case, some societies have appropriated a large share of the atmosphere’s absorptive capacity;
others have appropriated very little. If the world decides to ‘enclose’ this common pool
resource—that is, to transform it from common property to collective property—it can only
enclose that part of it that remains in common; the part that has already been appropriated
now belongs to the societies that appropriated it, and so is not available for enclosure.
Luc Bovens offers a powerful argument by analogy for this approach. He asks us to imagine
a lake that is initially used by a handful of people rowing small boats. In this condition, the
lake can be left as common property; anyone who wishes to use it may do so. As the popu-
lation grows larger and richer, however, the number and size of boats on the lake increases.
Eventually, the lake becomes so congested that access must be restricted if the lake is to
remain useable. Bovens considers two options for restricting access: One is to distribute
access equally or by lottery to all members of the community, ignoring each boater’s existing
investment in boats, marinas, and so forth. The other is to grant transferable permits to each
existing user in proportion to his or her existing use of the lake. The latter, Bovens submits,
is more just than the former, for it neither harms the existing users of the lake, nor undermines
their legitimate expectations about the future, nor arbitrarily grants a valuable resource (i.e.
lake access) to those who had previously expressed no interest in it (i.e. community members
who had previously chosen not to buy boats). By analogy, we should not ignore societies’
existing investments in using the atmosphere’s absorptive capacity. Instead, we should dis-
tribute the remaining emissions budget in accordance with country’s current levels of invest-
ment, as measureable by their emissions in some recent reference year (Bovens, 2011). Posner
and Weisbach (2010) offer a very similar argument in terms of shepherds and pastures.
Tremmel (2013) offers a series of analogies involving the harvesting of wild apples, one of
which counts against the Original Budget assumption.
Like all analogies, Bovens’ is imperfect. He acknowledges certain disanalogies himself.
Most importantly, there are other lakes in the world, as well as substitutes for lakes, but there
 Ethics, Policy & Environment   347

is only one atmosphere, and no adequate substitute for emissions rights (Bovens, 2011).
There is a further disanalogy that Bovens does not point out: Past boaters did not consume
anything that they could have left for future boaters; past emitters did. Thus, the primary
motivation for historical accountability in the case of emissions rights is missing from the lake
analogy, as well as Posner and Weisbach’s pasture analogy. In my view, these two dissimilar-
ities undermine the analogy. (Similar critiques apply to Posner & Weisbach’s analogy and to
Tremmel’s.) The analogy does, however, highlight the same point raised by the rug-pulling
objection: it would be unjust to ignore the harms that historically high-emitting countries
would suffer if their retroactive allocation of emissions rights were close to or smaller than
their cumulative emissions.
Analogies like Bovens’, however, are not the only justification for the Lockean objection
to the main argument of this section. The primary justification comes directly from Lockean
views of property, rooted in widely held views about natural rights. The objection still fails,
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however; for, any plausible Lockean theory of property acquisition must contain something
like the ‘Lockean Proviso’ (Nozick, 1974, 175ff.). That is, it must impose some upper bound—
probably dependent on others’ need—on the share of common property that any one person
can appropriate. In Locke’s famous but mysterious formulation, each person must leave
‘enough and as good’ in common for others. However we interpret this phrase, the now-de-
veloped countries have not left ‘enough and as good’ for the developing countries. In par-
ticular, the remaining emissions budget is too small for the developing countries to follow
the same path to human development that the developed countries did, and there is no
other path available for now. This amounts to a violation of the Lockean Proviso. Thus, not
even a Lockean theory of distributive justice undermines the Original Budget assumption.

5. Conclusion
Framing mitigation in terms of the allocation of a global emissions budget offers several
advantages. One of them, I have argued here, is that it transforms the question of historical
accountability from a question of corrective justice to one of narrow distributive justice. This
is an advantage because narrow distributive justice is much more easily applied to trans-
generational entities, like societies, than corrective and restorative justice are. I offered three
arguments—the Social Choice Argument, the Emissions Thief Argument, and the Reasonable
Pluralism Argument—for the claim that societies are the proper claimants. I offered an argu-
ment by analogy for the claim that narrow distributive justice requires historical accounta-
bility. I suggested that the analogy works because the principles of distributive justice
operate even when no one realizes that justice is relevant. I concluded that there are defen-
sible assumptions on which a just distribution of the global emissions budget must be
historically sensitive.

Notes
1. 
See Halme (2007) for a detailed, largely sympathetic discussion of Caney’s argument on this
point.
2. 
The basic idea of an emissions budget appears in some of the earliest work in climate ethics,
such as (Shue, 1993), but it has only moved center stage and been developed in detail in the
last 5–10 years.
 348    D. R. Morrow

3. 
Narrow distributive justice may entail historical accountability on other assumptions, too, but
I will not explore other options here. Meyer and Roser (2010) argue that their isolationist–
welfarist approach to the just distribution of emissions rights entails historical accountability,
as well, but they work from incompatible—and, as I argue here, mistaken—assumptions. In
particular, they take individuals to be the rightful claimants on the benefits of emissions rights.
Furthermore, Meyer and Roser rely on stronger assumptions about the nature of distributive
justice than is required here.
4. 
For a detailed discussion of the difference between the perspective of morality in general and
the perspective of desert, see (Kagan, 2012, 28ff.).
5. 
In keeping with the academic literature on social choice, this definition trivially includes states
of affairs that obtain for everyone but are not normally considered objects of social choice, such
as what color Amartya Sen paints his walls. Choices about such minor matters are usually left
up to individuals and do not significantly affect other individuals’ emissions. Thus, the claim
is not that all social choices are beyond individuals’ control or that they all significantly affect
individuals’ emissions, but only that individuals’ emissions are significantly affected by some
social choices over which they have very little control.
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6. 
This is not to deny that there are important issues of domestic justice in the distribution
of emissions shares. It is only to say that some of those issues should not be central to an
international climate treaty.
7. 
Thanks to [a clever philosopher] Justin Moss for this objection.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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