ABSTRACT

Many of us believe that we can and do have individual obligations to refrain from contributing to massive collective harms – say, from producing luxury greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; however, our individual actions are so small as to be practically meaningless. Can we then, justify the intuition that we ought to refrain? In this paper, we argue that this debate may have been mis-framed. Rather than investigating whether or not we have obligations to refrain from contributing to collective action, perhaps we should ask whether we have reason to do so. However, this framing brings challenges of its own, and so we close by asking what problems are generated if we focus on these questions of ‘contributory ethics’.

摘要

我们中的许多人认为，我们可以而且确实负有个人义务，避免造成巨大的集体伤害-例如，产生豪华温室气体（GHG）排放；但是，我们的个人行动是如此之小，以至于几乎没有任何意义。那么我们能否证明我们应该避免的直觉是正确的呢？在本文中，我们认为这场辩论的框架可能不正确。与其调查我们是否有义务不对集体行动作出贡献，不如我们应询问我们是否有理由这样做。但是，这种构架带来了自身的挑战，因此，如果我们专注于“贡献性伦理”这些问题，那么我们首先要问会产生什么问题。