How legitimate expectations matter in climate justice

Abstract

Expectations play an important role in how people plan their lives and pursue their projects. People living in highly industrialized countries share a way of life that comes with high levels of emissions. Their expectations to be able to continue their projects imply their holding expectations to similarly high future levels of personal emissions. We argue that the frustration or undermining of these expectations would cause them significant harm. Further, the article investigates under what conditions people can be thought to hold legitimate expectations, in particular about permissible levels of future emissions. We distinguish differing theories of understanding these conditions, namely authority-based and justice-based theories, that each allows us to systematically distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate expectations. Furthermore, with respect to individuals’ future permissible emissions we give several reasons for holding that such theories cannot identify a particular expectation to a specific level of personal emissions as the only legitimate one. Finally, we argue that the set of legitimate expectations that people hold with respect to a just and effective solution to climate change has normative significance in at least two ways: the differing but equally legitimate expectations ought to be taken into account when justifying what could count as such a solution and when determining the just way of arriving at and implementing such a solution.

Multiple carbon accounting to support just and effective climate policies

“…Even if they can be said to have known about the consequences, their actions may be permissible if restricting their emissions to protect future generations were to place excessive demands on them. 35,36,37,38 These problems have the potential to seriously limit the applicability of compensatory justice. Thus, compensation payments for climate damage are very difficult to justify.…”

Decarbonisation and World Poverty: A Just Transition for Fossil Fuel Exporting Countries?

“…Compensation is not owed just whenever someone's expectations are thwarted, but rather when those expectations have developed reasonably in response to some directive or incentive knowingly offered by a proper political or legal authority (Brown 2017:10), with discussion often focusing on the institutions of the state (Meyer andSanklecha 2014: 372, Buchanan 1975 But it is less certain that FFECs can make a good case for redress from the international community as a whole, for it is not clear which international authority has served to encourage their expectation to be able to continue to extract and sell fossil fuels. If it is to proceed, the argument must invoke a more diffuse set of actors.…”

Legitimate Expectations and Land

“…A Nozickean would not be convinced. That, though, is a separate problem, and is discussed in Meyer and Sanklecha (2014). They address this conflict by appealing to acceptable ranges of distribution (rather than distributive justice per se), which allows them to broaden the range of expectations that are considered legitimate while still taking distributive (fairness) requirements seriously.…”

“…Most discussions of legitimate expectations in political theory take as their starting point Rawls's account, which appeals to the idea of expectations developed under a just political and legal system, and have extended this idea to justify compensation and 'grandfathering' clauses (Rawls 1971;Meyer and Sanklecha 2014;Stilz 2011). The concept is also used in applied ethics and transitional justice, to justify a transitional justice principle, in relation to such thing as climate change policy (Green 2013).…”