All: I can’t emphasize strongly enough why the piece by Svoboda is critically important – as a matter of democratic governance and because we are not scientifically, socially, and (particularly) ethically omniscient.
Svoboda states: * There is an ethical obligation to comply with procedural justice, rooted in the obligation to respect other persons. * Deferring to procedural justice offers a useful way to navigate ethical and scientific uncertainty. * Under conditions of ethical and scientific uncertainty, interested parties have a special right to contribute to decision-making that is likely to impact them substantially. Why is there such an ethical obligation of procedural justice based on an obligation to respect others? That goes to ethical theories of the universe, life and personhood, about which no doubt there will be extensive disagreement. But as a matter of democratic political theory, it goes to every “person” having an equal voice in their government (the “all men [and now women and persons of color and of other genders] are created equal.” This principle is of course hotly contested right now, across the world and in the US (just see the recent events in Charlottesville). But significantly, the principle derives from Christian religion – see the absolutely terrific book by Jeremy Waldron, GOD, LOCKE, AND EQUALITY. The procedural justice requirement of equal respect (for each person’s voice and voting rights to affect policy) is (after many centuries and in most but clearly not all countries) how we now operate – in a democracy as a matter of political (and thus of ethical) beliefs. But we don’t have centralized government for the world (yet) and thus we have yet to develop some form of legitimate institutional governance structure that reflects this democratic equality principle (and the U.N.’s current structure reflects only incomplete efforts on the road to that goal). As I have written elsewhere (sorry for the lack of direct links, and for the implicit self-promotion), jurisdictional conflicts over how to view such ethical obligations – and political and social responses to them – largely governs how we view “success” in responding to environmental crises; the conflicts also determine which levels of government take the relevant actions, and because we don’t have a Tardis can’t try the counter-factual experiments to see how things might have been different (and thus better or worse) if we had made different jurisdictional choices reflecting different values of different groups of “publics.” See Joshua D. Sarnoff, The Continuing Imperative (But Only From A National Perspective) For Federal Environmental Protection, 7 DUKE ENVTL. L. & POL’Y FORUM 225 (1997); see also a later reply to Ricky Revesz’s thoughtful response in Joshua D. Sarnoff, A Reply To Professor Revesz’s Response In “The Race To The Bottom And Federal Environmental Legislation”, 8 DUKE ENVTL. L. & POL’Y FORUM 295 (1998) (Revesz’s and others arguments, and citations to them, are in those articles). I have similarly written about the need for “proximate” decision-making by the jurisdiction representing all significantly affected persons, and why centralized governmental units thus should be required to make top level value choices and policy decisions when the interests of voters and non-voters who live in different sub-jurisdictions are sufficiently affected. See Joshua D. Sarnoff, Cooperative Federalism, The Delegation of Federal Power, and the Constitution, 39 ARIZ. L. REV. 205 (1997). I also have tried to explain why we need international agreement on values before we will make progress regarding policy choices, see A World Law Without Agreement On Environmental Values?, 10 COL. J. INT. ENVTL. L. & POL’Y 251 (1999). Of greater relevance to the Svoboda piece, the question remains of why ethical (or scientific) uncertainty GENERATES calls for equality (as our form of procedural justice in a democracy) as well as of and equal treatment (as substantive justice whether in a democracy or otherwise). I have also engaged in the legal/philosophical debate over whether “prescriptive equality” – calls for equal treatment, rather than for “fair” or “correct” treatment -- has any normative force or relevance. My argument is available in Joshua D. Sarnoff, Equality as Uncertainty, 84 IOWA L. REV. 377 (1999). That argument in brief is that we have in Western culture (likely originating from monotheism) a deeply rooted “anti-arbitrariness” norm that compels us to treat people and issues equally when we are insufficiently convinced of the correctness of our judgmental criteria that might differentiate among them (and which judgmental criteria would then compel on their own either equal treatment or unequal treatment, as a matter of substantive morality). Chris Peters’ offered a very thoughtful response, and I offered a further reply in Joshua D. Sarnoff, I Come To Praise Morality, Not To Bury It, 84 IOWA L. REV. 819 (1999), hoping to demonstrate that all of his proferred counter-examples assumed a confidence in judgment that I was questioning. I have not applied that theory to scientific uncertainty, but I suspect the anti-arbitrariness norm operates very strongly in that domain as well. Thus, the most helpful things that I think we can do in the short term are: (1) to try to build consensus around our normative criteria for ethical and scientific judgments in regard to climate change and geoengineering (and other) responses; and (2) to try to get our political structure to look more like “one person one vote,” by building some new type of international governance structure (as soon as possible) that can (in our divided world of unequally distributed power relations) come closer to approximating our political democratic beliefs that each person’s voice should have equal power to be heard and to influence (centrally determined) policies (which can include delegation of norm-setting, policy choices, and implementation to subsidiary governance bodies – including existing nation states). But getting there will be a very difficult process. Best, Josh Sarnoff Joshua D. Sarnoff Professor of Law DePaul University College of Law Center for Intellectual Property Law and Information Technology 2014-2015 Thomas A. Edison Distinguished Scholar, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office 25 E. Jackson Chicago, IL 60604 +1 312.362.6326 phone +1 312.362.5448 fax [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> http://ssrn.com/author=29684 From: <[email protected]> on behalf of "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Reply-To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Date: Friday, August 25, 2017 at 10:03 AM To: geoengineering <[email protected]> Subject: [geo] Re: Why Procedural Justice Matters for Climate Engineering This piece, by Toby Svoboda, was originally published by the Forum for Climate Engineering Assessment: http://ceassessment.org/procedural-justice/<http://ceassessment.org/procedural-justice/> On Thursday, August 24, 2017 at 1:54:15 PM UTC-4, Andrew Lockley wrote: Poster's note : deja vu, but seemingly not posted before https://www.environmentguru.com/pages/elements/element.aspx?id=5368065 Why Procedural Justice Matters for Climate Engineering HOMENEWSAIR QUALITYCLIMATE CHANGE Select Language▼ Broadly speaking, we may distinguish two types of justice: substantive and procedural. Both are relevant for climate policy. Substantive justice concerns how states of affairs ought to be ordered, including how the burdens and benefits of some policy should be distributed among various parties. Procedural justice concerns how decisions ought to be made, including whose voices should be heard in decision-making. This type of justice presumably requires that parties with a substantial stake have an opportunity to contribute to relevant decisions. It is fairly obvious that substantive justice matters for climate engineering policies. This is true of both solar radiation management and greenhouse gas removal varieties, because either could affect the distribution of burdens and benefits among persons. Because of this, we could evaluate whether some such policy is likely to secure the distribution required by substantive justice (whatever that might be). The result of this evaluation might give us ethical reasons to oppose or support the policy in question. It is perhaps less obvious that procedural justice matters for climate engineering. Why should we care about how decisions are made, provided that the outcomes of such decisions are line with substantive justice? In my recent book, The Ethics of Climate Engineering: Solar Radiation Management and Non-Ideal Justice (Routledge), I offer the following three reasons why procedural justice is important for decision-making about climate engineering. There is an ethical obligation to comply with procedural justice, rooted in the obligation to respect other persons. Deferring to procedural justice offers a useful way to navigate ethical and scientific uncertainty. Under conditions of ethical and scientific uncertainty, interested parties have a special right to contribute to decision-making that is likely to impact them substantially. First, and most conventionally, I argue that it is ethically impermissible to ignore the demands of procedural justice. To do so would exhibit disrespect for those persons who are inappropriately excluded from decision-making. Importantly, this would be impermissible even if the resulting policy benefited parties who were unjustly excluded. We might think of that as a kind of paternalism. The second reason is pragmatic. There is a great deal of scientific uncertainty surrounding the likely impacts of potential climate engineering policies. Continued research might reduce this uncertainty but is unlikely to eliminate it. Likewise, there is a great deal of ethical uncertainty regarding what climate policies we ought to adopt. Climate change raises a host of controversial ethical issues, including the question of what substantive justice requires. It is therefore not clear that common-sense moral thinking is up to the task of determining what climate policies are appropriate. Deferring to procedurally just decision-making processes can be useful for navigating such scientific and ethical uncertainty. As I argue in the book, “This is because, plausibly, a procedurally just framework will allow for decision-making that is iterative, responsive to changing conditions, and open to various points of view. This last feature, in particular, may provide a helpful check on controversial proposals” (page 76). The third reason to favor procedural justice resembles elements of the previous two, but it is nonetheless distinct from both. The claim is that, in cases of substantial uncertainty, interested parties have a right to contribute to decisions likely to impact them in substantial ways. This is different from the first reason, because the right in question only arises due to substantial uncertainty, whereas the obligation to respect persons is always in play. I use the analogy of a patient whose doctor offers two courses of treatment, both of them risky and uncertain to work. Just as the patient should be permitted to decide how to proceed, so should interested parties be permitted to contribute to decisions on whether to deploy climate engineering. I have said nothing here about what procedural justice specifically requires. Rather, I have sought to give reasons for why we should care about it in the first place. For those interested, the book itself provides a more detailed account of these reasons. Toby Svoboda is an assistant professor in the department of philosophy at Fairfield University. His research focuses on environmental ethics, Kant, and climate change. He is the author of The Ethics of Climate Engineering: Solar Radiation Management and Non-Ideal Justice (Routledge). The Forum for Climate Engineering Assessment does not necessarily endorse the ideas contained in this or any other guest post. Our aim is to provide a space for the expression of a range of perspectives on climate engineering. Forum for Climate Engineering Assessment Climate Change Greenhouse Gas Published:8/23/2017 Source: https://www.environmentguru.com/pages/elements/element.aspx?id=5368065 © EnvironmentGuru.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. 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