Both Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Baylor Johnson hold that under current circumstances, individuals lack obligations to reduce their personal contributions to greenhouse gas emissions. Johnson argues that climate change has the structure of a tragedy of the commons, and that there is no unilateral obligation to reduce emissions in a commons. Against Johnson, I articulate two rationales for an individual obligation to reduce one's greenhouse gas emissions. I first discuss moral integrity, which recommends congruence between one's actions and positions at the personal and political levels. Second, I draw on a Confucian, relational conception of persons to offer a critique of the collective action/tragedy of the commons framework itself. Under the relational conception, commons problems can be reconceptualised so as to dissolve the stark contrast between the individually and the collectively rational. This perspective can inform our approach to climate change and help reconcile individual and political action to mitigate it.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.Abstract. The relationship between mistletoes and birds has been studied from the perspectives of mutualism and seed dispersal. Here, we emphasize the role that avian dispersers play as agents of mistletoe seed transmission to plant hosts. We describe the patterns of transmission of the seeds of Tristerix aphyllus, an endophytic Chilean mistletoe, on two of its columnar cacti hosts (Eulychnia acida and Echinopsis skottsbergii) by the Chilean Mockingbird Mimus thenca. In north-central Chile, these cacti grow in relatively discrete subpopulations on north-facing slopes. We measured variation in seed transmission within 10 subpopulations varying in species composition, host density, parasite density, parasite prevalence (defined as the percentage of hosts infested in a given population), and disperser abundance. Seed transmission was independent of species, but was strongly dependent on prior parasitism. Parasitized individuals received seeds much more frequently than expected from their relative abundance. We found no correlation between the density of hosts and seed transmission. We found strong positive correlations, however, between parasite prevalence and seed transmission to both parasitized and nonparasitized hosts. Seed transmission of T. aphyllus seeds by M. thenca appeared to be frequency-rather than densitydependent. Seed transmission was also tightly and positively correlated with the abundance of seed-dispersing birds at each site. Because bird abundance and parasite prevalence were correlated, we conducted path analysis to disentangle their relative effect on seed transmission. A model including only the direct effect of bird abundance and the indirect effect of parasite prevalence through bird abundance explained roughly the same variance as a full model including both the direct and indirect effects of bird abundance and prevalence on seed transmission. Apparently, variation in bird abundance was the main determinant of variation in transmission. We suggest that mistletoes, host plants, and the birds that disperse mistletoe seeds are systems well suited for studies of the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of disease transmission.

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