Climate Resistance and the Far Future

• In Event: Possibilities for Climate Justice in a Non-Ideal World

Abstract

The Anthropocene, marking an era in which humans constitute a planetary force, is characterised by environmental injustices that are distinctive in their scope, magnitude and complexity. The paradigm case is that of climate change. The harms inflicted by climate change are intergenerational, extending possibly millennia into the future. Although uncertain, we know that the magnitude of climate change harm will be severe, and indeed even poses a number of extinction threats, including to humanity. These harms, however, are non-linear, overdetermined and the result of aggregate-level phenomena, and so the objectionable climate outcomes cannot straightforwardly be connected to the acts of individual or corporate moral agents. The unique nature of this injustice has serious implications for the ethics of political resistance, and these challenges have not yet been explored in depth by philosophers. This paper begins to remedy this neglect.

More specifically, I pursue two main aims. First, I argue that an unrecognised form of climate injustice stems from the fact that future generations will be unable to engage in political resistance against the harms they will suffer. I will develop an account of this injustice by showing that an important set of what I call intrinsic resistance goods are unavailable to the victims of future climate change, or when they are available can only be accessed in a significantly diminished form. Intrinsic resistance goods represent a means for people to express their agency in the face of injustice and, as a result, are an important part of non-ideal justice. I draw out and elucidate three different intrinsic resistance goods, which I label self-respect, solidarity and testimony. My claim is that each of these goods, though to different extents and in different ways, presuppose a kind of relation between those who suffer from an injustice and those who experience it which is difficult to sustain in the case of climate change given the temporal disconnect between causes and effects.

Second, I explore the implications of this injustice for contemporary duties of climate of resistance. Here, my argument is that although present actors cannot enable future people to access these intrinsic resistance goods or act as surrogates on their behalf, attention to the injustice I identify reveals the important symbolic dimensions of climate resistance. This has implications, I suggest, for the ways in which current resistors should frame their engagement with climate action. Specifically, I show that those who engage in climate resistance should aim to foster a form of global and intergenerational solidarity with present and future victims of climate injustice, and I conclude by highlighting the sort of action this might entail.

Author

• Alex McLaughlin, University of Cambridge