Why it’s Fine to Offset one’s Carbon Emissions by Paying Others to Pollute Less: A Deontological Account of Risk Imposition
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: the emissions of others (e.g.paying people to shift to renewable energy sources), we are never permitted to opt for the latter, no matter how much more carbon we could forestall than sequester.1 There is a better way.I show in this paper that standard deontological principles already provide an adequate account of the permissibility of risk imposition, and they justify offsetting by both forestalling and sequestering.Moreover, they do so in a much simpler way than PARI does, and without sacrificing any of the intuitive data which motivates PARI in the first place.My argument is structured as follows.In section 1 I present Barry and Cullity's fourfold principle of permissible risk imposition, explaining how it applies to all the cases Barry and Cullity consider in their paper.In section 2 I introduce what I regard as a maximally conservative extension of standard, unreformed deontology to the context of uncertainty.I show in section 3 that deontology, thus characterized, entails all the intuitive data Barry and Cullity work so hard to recover, and in a more parsimonious way.Finally, as a few cases will illustrate, the standard view generalizes much more plausibly than PARI, and has happier implications for climate ethics.
Source: The Journal of Value Inquiry
Author: Nicolas Côté
Institution: University of Glasgow
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,190
OpenAlex ID: W4407085965