Offsetting Class Privilege

The UK is an unequal society. Societies like these raise significant ethical questions for those who live in them. One is how they should respond to such inequality, and in particular, to its effects on those who are worst-off. In this article, I’ll approach this question by focusing on the obligations of a particular group of those who are best-off. I’ll defend the idea of morally objectionable class-based advantage, which I’ll call ‘class privilege’, argue that class privilege can be non-culpable, and put forward an account of the obligations those with class privilege have. My main claim will be that those with class privilege have obligations to ‘offset’ their privilege, in something like the same way high emitters have obligations to offset their greenhouse gas emissions

Collectives' and individuals' obligations: a parity argument

Individuals have various kinds of obligations: keep promises, don’t cause harm, return benefits received from injustices, be partial to loved ones, help the needy and so on. How does this work for group agents? There are two questions here. The first is whether groups can bear the same kinds of obligations as individuals. The second is whether groups’ pro tanto obligations plug into what they all-things-considered ought to do to the same degree that individuals’ pro tanto obligations plug into what they all-things-considered ought to do. We argue for parity on both counts

Offsetting Race Privilege

For all the talk lately about privilege, few have commented on the moral obligations associated with having privilege. Those who have commented have not gone much beyond the idea that the privileged should be conscious of their privilege and should listen to those who do not have it. Here we want to go further and build an account of the moral obligations of those with a particular kind of privilege: race privilege. In this paper, we articulate an understanding of race privilege, show how a person can know when she has it and argue that a race-privileged person has obligations to offset her privilege. We make concrete suggestions for how she can, at least approximately, do this. We use particular racial-group disparities in the United States as our running example throughout the paper, although our conclusions generalize

Accelerating the carbon cycle: the ethics of enhanced weathering

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Royal Society via the DOI in this record.Enhanced weathering, in comparison to other geoengineering measures, creates the possibility of a reduced cost, reduced impact way of decreasing atmospheric carbon, with positive knock-on effects such as decreased oceanic acidity. We argue that ethical concerns have a place alongside empirical, political and social factors as we consider how to best respond to the critical challenge that anthropogenic climate change poses. We review these concerns, considering the ethical issues that arise (or would arise) in the large-scale deployment of enhanced weathering. We discuss post-implementation scenarios, failures of collective action, the distribution of risk and externalities and redress for damage. We also discuss issues surrounding ‘dirty hands’ (taking conventionally immoral action to avoid having to take action that is even worse), whether enhanced weathering research might present a moral hazard, the importance of international governance and the notion that the implementation of large-scale enhanced weathering would reveal problematic hubris. Ethics and scientific research interrelate in complex ways: some ethical considerations caution against research and implementation, while others encourage them. Indeed, the ethical perspective encourages us to think more carefully about how, and what types of, geoengineering should be researched and implemented.European CommissionTempleton World Charity Foundatio

Benefiting from Failures to Address Climate Change

The politics of climate change is marked by the fact that countries are dragging their heels in doing what they ought to do; namely, creating a binding global treaty, and fulfilling the duties assigned to each of them under it. Many different agents are culpable in this failure. But we can imagine a stylised version of the climate change case, in which no agents are culpable: if the bad effects of climate change were triggered only by crossing a particular threshold, and it was reasonably, but mistakenly, believed by each country that insufficiently many other countries were willing to cooperate in order for that threshold to remain uncrossed, no country would be required to make a unilateral contribution. Yet even without culpability, we can diagnose a moral ill: the world has gone other than it should have. If not for the mistaken beliefs, there would have been a global climate treaty, and all the avoidance of future suffering that would come with it. In this article I argue that this moral ill has implications for the non-culpable agents, in that it generates duties to disgorge actual holdings over and above the counterpart holdings in the relevant counterfactual: those holdings the agents would have had, were the world to have gone as it should

What 'We'?

The objective of this paper is to explain why certain authors – both popular and academic – are making a mistake when they attribute obligations to uncoordinated groups of persons, and to argue that it is particularly unhelpful to make this mistake given the prevalence of individuals faced with the difficult question of what morality requires of them in a situation in which there is a good they can bring about together with others, but not alone. I will defend two alternatives to attributing obligations to uncoordinated groups. The first solution has us build better people, who will coordinate their actions willingly and spontaneously when the occasion arises. The second solution has us build better groups, so that when the occasion arises, there is a framework in place for coordinating members into action

Accelerating the carbon cycle: the ethics of enhanced weathering.

Enhanced weathering, in comparison to other geoengineering measures, creates the possibility of a reduced cost, reduced impact way of decreasing atmospheric carbon, with positive knock-on effects such as decreased oceanic acidity. We argue that ethical concerns have a place alongside empirical, political and social factors as we consider how to best respond to the critical challenge that anthropogenic climate change poses. We review these concerns, considering the ethical issues that arise (or would arise) in the large-scale deployment of enhanced weathering. We discuss post-implementation scenarios, failures of collective action, the distribution of risk and externalities and redress for damage. We also discuss issues surrounding 'dirty hands' (taking conventionally immoral action to avoid having to take action that is even worse), whether enhanced weathering research might present a moral hazard, the importance of international governance and the notion that the implementation of large-scale enhanced weathering would reveal problematic hubris. Ethics and scientific research interrelate in complex ways: some ethical considerations caution against research and implementation, while others encourage them. Indeed, the ethical perspective encourages us to think more carefully about how, and what types of, geoengineering should be researched and implemented

Challenges in operationalizing the water–energy–food nexus

Concerns about the water–energy–food (WEF) nexus have motivated many discussions regarding new approaches for managing water, energy and food resources. Despite the progress in recent years, there remain many challenges in scientific research on the WEF nexus, while implementation as a management tool is just beginning. The scientific challenges are primarily related to data, information and knowledge gaps in our understanding of the WEF inter-linkages. Our ability to untangle the WEF nexus is also limited by the lack of systematic tools that could address all the trade-offs involved in the nexus. Future research needs to strengthen the pool of information. It is also important to develop integrated software platforms and tools for systematic analysis of the WEF nexus. The experience made in integrated water resources management in the hydrological community, especially in the framework of Panta Rhei, is particularly well suited to take a lead in these advances

A Logical Verification Methodology for Service-Oriented Computing

We introduce a logical verification methodology for checking behavioural properties of service-oriented computing systems. Service properties are described by means of SocL, a branching-time temporal logic that we have specifically designed to express in an effective way distinctive aspects of services, such as, e.g., acceptance of a request, provision of a response, and correlation among service requests and responses. Our approach allows service properties to be expressed in such a way that they can be independent of service domains and specifications. We show an instantiation of our general methodology that uses the formal language COWS to conveniently specify services and the expressly developed software tool CMC to assist the user in the task of verifying SocL formulae over service specifications. We demonstrate feasibility and effectiveness of our methodology by means of the specification and the analysis of a case study in the automotive domain