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This paper addresses the phenomenon of climate-induced displacement. I argue that there is scope for an account of asylum as compensation owed to those displaced by the impacts of climate change which needs only to appeal to minimal normative commitments about the requirements of global justice. I demonstrate the possibility of such an approach through an examination of the work of David Miller. Miller is taken as an exemplar of a broadly ‘international libertarian’ approach to global justice, and his work is a useful vehicle for this project because he has an established view about both responsibility for climate change and about the state’s right to exclude would-be immigrants. In the course of the argument, I set out the relevant aspects of Miller’s views, reconstruct an account of responsibility for the harms faced by climate migrants which is consistent with Miller’s views, and demonstrate why such an account yields an obligation to provide asylum as a form of compensation to ‘climate migrants.’
In Justice and Reconciliation in World Politics Catherine Lu endorses the idea that those who contribute to the reproduction of structural injustice have responsibilities to address that injustice (Lu, 2017). However, in the book, Lu does not explore the grounds and justification for recognising such a responsibility. In order to address this deficit, this paper proposes that those likely to contribute to the reproduction of structural injustice, in the future, have precautionary duties, in the present, that require them to take action aimed at preventing their future contribution. It is proposed that these ‘collectivization duties’ (Collins, 2013) require them to act responsively with a view to forming a collective that can end the structural injustice in question. This account recommends a collective-action solution alongside recognising that each socially connected agent is obliged to act. However, it does not entail that amorphous groups bear responsibilities and is appropriate in its attribution of blame, thus avoiding both Nussbaum’s (2011) critique of perpetually forward-looking accounts and the ‘agency objection’ (Wringe, 2010).
Ibegin by providing some background to conceptions of responsibility. I note the extent of disagreement in this area, the diverse and cross-cutting distinctions that are deployed, and the relative neglect of some important problems. These facts make it difficult to attribute responsibility for climate change, but so do some features of climate change itself which I go on to illuminate. Attributions of responsibility are often contested sites because such attributions are fundamentally pragmatic, mobilized in the service of a normative outlook. We should be pluralists about responsibility and shape whatever conceptions can help to explain, guide, and motivate our responses to climate change. I sketch one such notion, ‘intervention-responsibility’, and argue that it should be ascribed to international regimes and organizations, states and other jurisdictions, individuals, and firms. Each has different capacities and thus different intervention-responsibilities responsibilities, but these differences are not always mirrored in public discussion. In particular, the moral responsibility of firms has been greatly neglected.
In this article I consider Thomas Pogge’s thesis that affluent countries are violating the human rights of the global poor by contributing support to the current global institutional order. My claim is that affluent countries are not violating the human rights of the global poor in the ways suggested by Pogge. I start by defining a set of conditions that ought to obtain in order to say that a human rights violation has taken place. Then I consider two possible interpretations of Pogge’s thesis and argue that none of them fulfills the conditions required to speak of a human rights violation. On my view, as long as domestic states have the capacity to fulfill the human rights of their own people, poverty constitutes a domestic human rights violation even if the international institutional order somehow contributes to creating this state of affairs. Finally, I examine what transnational duties human rights entail and claim that affluent countries must contribute to the creation of an international order providing domestic states accurate background conditions for the promotion of human rights at the domestic level.