| Duties of corrective justice are duties to bear the costs that result from one's wrongful behavior. My dissertation investigates whether and to what extent agents have incurred duties of corrective justice to bear costs associated with climate change. After a brief introductory chapter (Chapter 1), in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, I argue that many individual persons have incurred duties of corrective justice to bear costs associated with climate change in virtue of having wrongfully contributed to climate change-induced harms and threats of future harm. In Chapter 2, I develop an account of wrongdoing in circumstances in which many agents contribute to a harm or threat of harm. I also develop and defend a principle that identifies the conditions under which an agent incurs a duty of corrective justice. In Chapter 3, I apply both the account of wrongdoing and the principle of corrective justice to the circumstances of climate change. I conclude that many individual persons have incurred duties of corrective justice to bear costs associated with climate change. In Chapter 4, I consider and respond to several objections both to my arguments in the previous two chapters and to the corrective justice approach to climate change justice more generally. In Chapter 5, I argue that agents' duties of corrective justice are considerably more extensive than many theorists have previously argued or assumed. To argue for this conclusion, I develop an account of how the costs of rectifying a collectively-caused harm or threat of harm ought to be distributed among agents who have incurred duties of corrective justice to bear costs. Finally, in Chapter 6, I consider the significance of the fact that it is only within the last thirty or so years that humans learned that they were causing climate change. I argue that agents have incurred duties of corrective justice to bear costs associated with climate change in virtue of having contributed to climate change even while they were reasonably ignorant that they were doing so. |
