Attached Solar Radiation Management and Comparative Climate Justice Toby Svoboda This is a pre-print version of a chapter appearing in Christopher Preston (ed.), Climate Justice and Geoengineering (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2016). If citing, please consult the published version, which contains minor changes. Solar radiation management (SRM)—i.e., any climate engineering technique that would reduce the fraction of incoming solar radiation absorbed by the planet—is a very interesting subject for distributive justice, or the type of justice that concerns how benefits and burdens should be apportioned among various parties. On the one hand, SRM techniques carry risks of substantial injustice to present and future parties, and ethicists interested in climate engineering have tended to focus on these possible injustices. On the other hand, SRM has the potential to manage current and impending injustices due to anthropogenic climate change, including risks of unjust harm to the global poor. This points to the possibility that, for all its potential ethical problems, a climate policy involving deployment of some SRM technique might perform better than other available options in securing distributively just (or minimizing distributively unjust) outcomes, at least in certain future contexts. In line with Christopher Preston’s argument in the introduction to this volume, I argue here that, although it is helpful to identify potential injustices associated with SRM, it is also crucial both to evaluate how SRM compares to other available options and to consider empirical conditions under which deployment might occur. In arguing for this view, I rely on a distinction between two types of question: (1) whether SRM would produce just or unjust outcomes in some case and (2) whether it would be just to deploy SRM in that same case. The former question pertains to whether some distribution of benefits and burdens is morally good or bad, whereas the latter pertains to whether some action or policy is morally permissible, impermissible, or obligatory. Although related, these two uses of justice do not come to the same thing. It may be that some climate policy involving SRM carries risks of substantial distributive injustice and yet is permissible or even obligatory. This is because, as I argue, considering what would be just to do should be comparative, taking into consideration both empirical conditions and the morally valuable and disvaluable features of alternative climate policies. To put this in a more intuitive manner, rightness and goodness can come apart—sometimes the right course of action produces bad outcomes. I will return to this distinction in greater detail below
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PRECJA.pdf
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