John Nolt offers a helpful, albeit rough quantitative analysis of the harmfulness of the average American's greenhouse gas emissions. By examining the lifetime contributions of the average American...

Climate change and other harmful large-scale processes challenge our understandings of individual responsibility. People throughout the world suffer harms—severe shortfalls in health, civic status, or standard of living relative to the vital needs of human beings—as a result of physical processes to which many people appear to contribute. Climate change, polluted air and water, and the erosion of grasslands, for example, occur because a great many people emit carbon and pollutants, build excessively, enable their flocks to overgraze, or otherwise stress (...) the environment. If a much smaller number of people engaged in these types of conduct, the harms in question would not occur, or would be substantially lessened. However, the conduct of any particular person (and, in the case of climate change, of even quite large numbers of people) could make no apparent difference to their occurrence. My carbon emissions (and quite possibly the carbon emissions of much larger groups of people dispersed throughout the world) may not make a difference to what happens to anyone. When the conduct of some agent does not make any apparent difference to the occurrence of harm, but this conduct is of a type that brings about harm because many people engage in it, we can call this agent an overdeterminer of that harm, and their conduct overdetermining conduct. In this essay we explore the moral status of overdetermining harm. (shrink)

As a collective action problem, climate change is best tackled by coordination. Most moral philosophers therefore agree on our individual responsibility as political citizens to help establish such coordination. There is disagreement, however, on our individual responsibilities as consumers to reduce emissions before such coordination is established. In this article I argue that from a Kantian deontological perspective we have a perfect duty to refrain from activities that we would not perform if appropriate coordination were established. Moral autonomy means that (...) we do not need to wait for an external lawmaker to tell us what we ought to do. In practice, this means basing our decisions on a shadow price for carbon: if we would not go out for a drive on a sunny Sunday afternoon in a gas-guzzling sport utility vehicle if gas prices were twice as high, we should not do it now. Moreover, we have imperfect duties to reduce emissions by more than our perfect duties require. (shrink)

We take no issue with John Nolt's calculations in ‘How harmful are the average American's greenhouse gas emissions?’. That is, we accept that over the course of a typical American life...

The present paper argues that when thematic roles are restricted to judgments about causal properties of events, it falls short of accounting for cases where thematic roles reflect judgments about dispositional properties of objects. I develop my argument with a case study on a class of verbs that have been called ‘Emission Verbs’ and which are difficult to bring in line with the unaccusativity hypothesis put forward by Perlmutter. Reviewing two diametrically opposed accounts of Emission Verbs in the (...) literature, I show that the thematic-semantic relation between the events described by Emission Verbs and their single arguments cannot be characterized unambiguously in terms of causal properties of events but pertains to dispositional properties residing in the emitter argument. The paper develops a lexical-semantic analysis of Emission Verbs according to which the event described by an Emission Verb is the manifestation of the dispositional property of the emitter argument when appropriate external circumstances obtain. The paper concludes by outlining how the proposed dispositional analysis of Emission Verbs may inform the analysis of the causative alternation. (shrink)

Anthropogenic climate change threatens humanity as a whole, making its mitigation a matter of pressing concern. Mitigation efforts at the institutional level are necessary to successfully change the course of climate change, but thus far governments and industries have been ineffective at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. A point of philosophical contention is whether individuals have a moral responsibility to reduce their own emissions given the lack of institutional action. I argue that they do by redefining climate change as a collective (...) impact. Individual emitters share collective responsibility for that impact, which translates to an individual duty to reduce their contribution. (shrink)

Upshot: I present reflections on the particularities of second-order science in response to the commentaries on my paper, as well as comments on the limitations of verbal analytical attempts to grasp the implicit circularity of observer-inclusion.

ABSTRACTRumination has long been considered a verbal thought process, though emerging evidence suggests that some individuals dwell on maladaptive imagery. This series of studies evaluated imagery and verbal thought during experimentally induced rumination and distraction. In Study 1, imagery and verbal thought during rumination resulted in similar increases in negative affect. Greater imagery during distraction, on the other hand, was associated with greater decreases in negative affect while verbal thought was not related to affect change. Given (...) that greater verbal thought was reported in the rumination condition and greater imagery was reported in the distraction condition, Study 2 evaluated whether the rumination/distraction induction was confounded by concurrent induction of imagery or verbal thought. The rumination prompts induced both rumination and verbal thought and the distraction prompts induced both distraction and imagery. Using a revised induction, Study 3 tested whether imagery and verbal t... (shrink)

We conceptualise CSR communication as a process of reciprocal influence between organisations and their audiences. We use an illustrative case study in the form of a conflict between firms and a powerful stakeholder which is played out in a series of 20 press releases over a 2-month period to develop a framework of analysis based on insights from linguistics. It focuses on three aspects of dialogism, namely (i) turn-taking (co-operating in a conversation by responding to the other party), (ii) inter-party (...) moves (the nature and type of interaction characterising a turn, i.e. denial, apology or excuse) and (iii) intertextuality (the intensity and quality of verbal interaction between the parties). We address the question: What is the nature and type of verbal interactions between the parties? First we examine (a) whether the parties verbally interact and then (b) whether the parties listen to each other. We find evidence of dialogism suggesting that CSR communication is an interactive process which has to be understood as a function of the power relations between a firm and a specific stakeholder. Also, we find evidence of intertextuality in press releases by six firms which engage in verbal interaction with the stakeholder. We interpret this as linguistic evidence of isomorphic processes relating to CSR practices resulting from the pressure exerted by a powerful stakeholder. The lack of response by ten firms that fail to issue press releases suggests a strategy of ‘watch-and-wait’ with respect to the outcome of the conflict. (shrink)

ObjectivePhysical and mental well-being are threatened by climate change. Since hospitals in high-income countries contribute significantly to climate change through their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the medical ethics imperative of ‘do no harm’ imposes a responsibility on hospitals to decarbonise. We investigated hospital stakeholders’ perceptions of hospitals’ GHG emissions sources and the sense of responsibility for reducing GHG emissions in a hospital.MethodsWe conducted 29 semistructured qualitative expert interviews at one of Germany’s largest hospitals, Heidelberg University Hospital. Five patients, 12 clinical (...) and 12 administrative employees on different levels were selected using purposive maximum variation sampling. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed using the framework approach.ResultsConcerning GHG emissions, hospital stakeholders perceived energy and waste as most relevant emission sources followed by mobility. Climate change mitigation in general was considered as important. However, in their role as patients or employees, hospital stakeholders felt less responsible for climate change mitigation. They saw providing best possible medical care to be the top priority in hospitals and were often concerned that patients’ health could be jeopardised by climate change mitigation measures.ConclusionPerceptions of most important emission sources did not coincide with those in literature, highlighting the need to inform stakeholders, for instance, about pharmaceuticals as important emission source. A frequently perceived conflict between reducing emissions and providing high-quality medical care could be eased, if reducing emissions would not only be justified as a contribution to mitigation, but also as a contribution to preventing ill health—a basic principle of medical ethics. (shrink)