Recognitional Justice, Climate Engineering, and the Care Approach

Abstract

Given the existing inequities in climate change, any proposed climate engineering strategy to solve the climate problem must meet a high threshold for justice. In contrast to an overly thin paradigm for justice that demands only a science-based assessment of potential temperature-related benefits and harms, we argue for the importance of attention to recognitional justice. Recognitional justice, we go on to claim, calls for a different type of assessment tool. Such an assessment would pay attention to neglected considerations such as relationships, context, power, vulnerability, narrative, and affect (amongst others). Here we develop a care-ethics related tool for assessing the justice (or injustice) of climate engineering with stratospheric aerosols, and suggest that qualitative social science methods may be required for its effective application. We illustrate the use of this tool with a case study involving interviews about stratospheric aerosol injection conducted in Kenya, the Solomon Islands, and the North American Arctic. Having shown through this case study the efficacy of the care approach for spotting recognitional injustice, we suggest that a care approach is not only sensitive to the considerations that count, it can also be powerfully normative.

The Ethical Desirability of Geoengineering: Challenges to Justice

“…Concerns about distributive justice in SRM are raised also from the viewpoints of virtue ethics and care ethics. From the perspectives of virtue and care ethics, the assessment is that the principle of fairness will not be respected in the SRM scenario [43,44].…”

The Ethics of Geoengineering: A Literature Review

“…But there are serious challenges with regard to compensation for SRM, such as, who ought to pay the compensation, who are the beneficiaries and how much to pay. "Polluter-pays (developed nations that are major carbon emitters should pay)," "beneficiaries pay (those benefitting from SRM should pay)," and "ability to pay" options are discussed, along with rectificatory justice (Svoboda and Food Justice The adverse impact of SRM on agriculture and food production is considered to be a major challenge (Dékány 2018;Pongratz et al 2012 Recognitional Justice Recognition is a type of assessment tool that would pay attention to neglected considerations such as relationships, context, power, vulnerability, narrative, and affect (Preston and Carr 2018;Hourdequin 2018;Jones 2018).…”

Anticipatory governance of solar geoengineering: conflicting visions of the future and their links to governance proposals

“…Flegal and Gupta [ 66 ] for example critique an equating of equity with an ‘epistemic challenge’ to be addressed through feasibility assessments or modelling the unequal distribution of risks. They argue that such ‘vanguard visions of equity’ sidestep the inequalities of access that prevent non-experts, especially the most vulnerable, from advancing their own perspective on equity in expert-driven visioning processes (see also [ 67 , 68 ]).…”