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International Ethics and the Environmental Crisis1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Robert E. Goodin
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Abstract

Environmental degradation can no longer be handled by means of traditional local remedies in the face of the current global environmental crisis. The author outlines specific ways to overcome the crisis through international means, obliging each individual nation to reduce its own hazardous production, while enjoining a collective effort to confront the challenge of global environmental deterioration. Only through policy-making based on the recognition of shared danger and international commitments to reduce damage can we achieve a shared moral responsibility for environmental protection.

Type
Articles
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 4 , March 1990 , pp. 91 - 105
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 1990

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References

2 Ward, Barbara and Dubois, René, Only One Earth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972).Google Scholar See also Stone, Peter B., Did We Save the Earth at Stockholm? (London: Earth Island, 1973).Google Scholar

3 That certainly is what is suggested by the policy-specific portions (e.g., parts 3 and 4) of Ward and Dubois' Only One Earth. Only in part 5 do they turn—briefly, and almost as an afterthought—to consider the larger questions of the “planetary order,” among them questions of climate modification that I here present as paradigmatic of the “new environmental crisis.” Similarly, the 1972 Stockholm Declaration on the Human Environment, Article I, Section 7, concedes that, inevitably, “Local and national government will bear the greatest burden for large-scale environmental policy and action within their jurisdiction,” even while acknowledging a “growing class of environmental problems [that] are regional or global in extent or affect the common international realm” that will therefore “require extensive cooperation among nations and action by international organizations in the common interest”; see International Legal Materials, Vol. 11 (1972), pp. 1416–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Wirth, David A., “Climate Chaos,” Foreign Policy, Vol. 74 (1989), pp. 3–22 at 7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Hart, H.L.A., “Are There Any Natural Rights?” Philosophical Review, Vol. 64 (1955), pp. 175–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Note, for example, the extent to which the “Proposed Legal Principles for Environmental Protection and Sustainable Development,” adopted by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland, all still largely pertain to problems of “transboundary environmental interferences”; WCED, Our Common Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), Annexe 1, pp. 348–51.Google Scholar

7 Ward, and Dubois, , Only One Earth, pp. 292–95.Google Scholar The detailed recommendations in the “Action Plan for Human Environment,” adopted at the Stockholm conference, all tend toward this same implication; the text is reprinted in International Legal Materials, Vol. 11 (1972), pp. 1421–69.Google Scholar

8 Matthews, Jessica Tuchman, “Redefining Security,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 68, No. 2 (Spring 1989), pp. 162–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, “Declaration on the Human Environment,” adopted in Stockholm on June 16, 1972; reprinted in International Legal Materials, Vol. 11 (1972), pp. 1416–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Those duties may sometimes correlate with, or indeed derive from, the rights of others. In that particular example, they actually do so. But even where they do, those are rights of the nation's own subjects, rather than of any national actor. What is crucial in differentiating this model from the last is precisely that fact: no other nation (necessarily) has any rights in the matter. (Of course, they may, as cosignatories of international agreements; but morally, nations arguably lie under some such duty even if they have not signed any relevant international instruments.).Google Scholar

11 “Proposed Legal Principles for Environmental Protection and Sustainable Development,”WCED, Our Common Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 348–51Google Scholar. Principle 1 of the 1972 Stockholm Declaration on the Human Environment—reprinted in International Legal Materials, Vol. 11 (1972), pp. 1416–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar at 1417–18—puts an identical point in rather more florid language.

12 To sample this way of thinking, see the Philosophy and Public Affairs debate between Michael Walzer and his critics that is reprinted in Beitz, Charles et al. , eds., International Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 165–246Google Scholar.

13 They may or may not, in any particular case. But even where we think they do, it seems somehow wrong to say that the duty derives from the right. Surely the duty would exist, even in the absence of any particular right (or rightholder) in the matter.Google Scholar

14 John Locke argues similarly in his Letter Concerning Toleration that there is no point in compelling outwardly pious religious performances from people whose hearts are not in it, since pious acts performed for fear of external sanction and not motivated by genuine belief will not procure the person's salvation.Google Scholar

15 In terms of contemporary moral philosophy, the former is deontological whereas the latter is consequentialist. For further elaboration of the distinction between duties and responsibilities at work here, see Goodin, Robert E., “Responsibilities,” Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 36 (1986), pp. 50–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 See further Pettit, Philip and Goodin, Robert E., “The Possibility of Special Duties.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 16 (1986), pp. 651–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 See further Goodin, Robert E., “Apportioning Responsibilities,” Law and Philosophy, Vol. 6 (1987), pp. 167–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Goodin, Robert E., Protecting the Vulnerable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).Google Scholar

19 For an application of such a model to environmental problems, see Taylor, Michael and Ward, Hugh, “Chickens, Whales and Lumpy Public Goods: Alternative Models of Public Goods Provision,” Political Studies, Vol. 30 (1982), pp. 350–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 As, indeed, the 1972 Stockholm Declaration does, when saying in Principle 24: “International matters concerning the protection and improvement of the environment should be handled in a cooperative spirit by all countries, big or small, on an equal footing. Cooperation through bilateral or multilateral arrangements or other appropriate means is essential, [but it must work] in such a way that due account is taken of the sovereignty and interests of all states.”.Google Scholar

21 Sometimes of course treaties do explicitly renounce sovereignty in certain respects, in which case the obligations arising under them may well be irrevocable.Google Scholar

22 These are reprinted in International Legal Materials, Vol. 26 (1987), pp. 1529–40 and 1550–61Google Scholar, respectively. For the purely illustrative purposes here, I shall simply gloss over the fact that the latter is a protocol concluded under the former Convention; the differences here described may reflect no more than the inevitably different levels of generality in such different documents.

23 A similar idea informs the classic paper by Kennan, George F., “To Prevent a World Wasteland: A Proposal,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 48 (1970), pp. 401–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 In other respects, however, the Montreal Protocol is less than a perfect paradigm. Instead of requiring fixed performances from each nation, regardless of how many other nations have signed and how much of the world emissions they account for, a regime of shared responsibilities would imply that the required performance should vary with those factors. The more signatories there are and the more emissions they account for, the less each should have to do, and vice versa. (Treaty obligations under this model would be more like the obligations falling to “names” in Lloyds insurance syndicates: how much each owes depends upon how many others there are in the syndicate, and upon the size of the claims against the syndicate as a whole.) In fairness, it should be said that the Montreal Protocol does also provide for regular meetings of signatories to update the list of ozone-depleting substances and requirements for their control, in light of subsequent research. Perhaps that, in practice, is the mechanism by which such adjustments would be made.Google Scholar