THE QUESTION OF RESPONSIBILITY
Dale Jamieson in his paper on Climate Change, Responsibility and Justice talks about the different kinds of responsibilities that the issue of climate change forces us to think about. He talks about individual moral responsibility which individuals have towards other individuals and political responsibility that certain countries have towards other countries.
Common sense morality is that sense of moral rules that we take into account when evaluating the everyday actions of the people around us and ourselves. There are various things that prick our conscious and we can easily understand that something is, as Jamieson says “fishy”. However, the issue of climate change is not so easy. The issue of morality, in…show more content… Jamieson explains this with a very good illustration using two individuals, Jack, the perpetrator, and Jill, the victim. We know clearly that Jack is wrong when he intentionally steals Jill’s bicycle. The individuals and the harm are easily identifiable and they are closely in related in space and time. However, when the case is altered such that Jack and Jill live on different continents and the loss of Jill’s bicycle is because of a causal chain that begins with Jack ordering a used bicycle or another case where Jack lives many centuries before Jill and consumes all materials essential for bicycle manufacturing, the question of morality gets a little blurred. The last two cases make it difficult for our common sense morality to perceive it as wrong on Jack’s part. Although, most people can understand that harm has been done. It is not intentional, the individuals can’t clearly be identified and they are not closely related in space and time. Climate change is similar to these last two cases. One country, in the first case and one generation, in the second case is busy consuming all the available resources that they are going to exhaust it for the other countries and generations respectively. The resource that we are talking about here is a healthy planet to live
