The Beneficiary Pays Principle and Climate Change

Abstract

This thesis is about our moral responsibility towards climate change. More narrowly, it is about whether benefiting from the processes which cause climate change makes a moral difference to the costs one should bear in addressing its associated harms. Many proponents of the ‘beneficiary pays principle’ think that it does. This principle claims that being an innocent beneficiary of significant harms inflicted by others may be sufficient to ground special duties to address these harms, at least when it is impossible to extract compensation from those who perpetrated the harm. My main aim in this thesis is to give a novel theoretical defence of the beneficiary pays principle, and justify its application to climate change.

Part I of this thesis motivates the beneficiary pays principle in the context of climate change. In Chapter 1, I survey recent empirical literature and argue that climate change raises an important moral problem: who should bear the costs of addressing its associated harms? I argue that the answer to this question involves weighing the duties allocated by various principles of responsibility: namely, the ability to pay principle, the contributor pays principle, and the beneficiary pays principle. I then discuss some support for the beneficiary pays principle that has been developed in the literature. Chapter 2 (co-authored with Christian Barry) examines what we take to be the most challenging objections that have been presented to the beneficiary pays principle. We argue that none of these existing objections undermine it as a principle of moral and practical importance for allocating the costs of addressing human-induced climate change.

Part II of this thesis gives a theoretical defence of the beneficiary pays principle. Chapters 3 examines four possible (and exhaustive) ways of formulating beneficiary pays and gives a prima facie argument in favour of a formulation that holds that the moral relevance of benefiting from wrongdoing reduces to some other factor, and that duties should only be allocated to beneficiaries in the presence of some other factor. This chapter then critically examines four existing proposals regarding when beneficiary pays is triggered to allocate duties, paving the way for my own positive account. In Chapter 4, I develop a rule-consequentialist rationale for beneficiary pays. I argue that benefiting-related duties should be allocated in cases (I call these property-violation and motivational-cause cases) in which this practice, if the wide majority tried to internalise it, should be expected to result in good consequences. In Chapter 5, I argue that this same rationale for beneficiary pays is also able to justify allocating duties to beneficiaries who hold or express pro-attitudes towards wrongdoing.

Part III applies my defence of beneficiary pays to the case of climate change. In Chapter 6, I argue that climate change should be assimilated to a property-violation, motivational-cause, and pro-attitude case. Since I argued in Part II that beneficiary pays is justified in these cases, I claim that the beneficiary pays principle is justified in playing an important role in allocating the costs of addressing climate change.