Contributing to Climate Change: A Contractualist Response to the Sceptic

As a consumer, am I morally obligated to reduce my personal greenhouse gas emissions footprint? As a citizen, do I have an obligation to support political measures that mitigate climate change? These important questions remain contentious. A central obstacle to affirmative answers lies in two familiar moral scepticisms: that any individual contribution seems too inconsequential to be morally significant and that the harms of climate change seem to occur regardless of one's share. I argue that T. M. Scanlon's moral contractualism should be brought in to enable a response. Contractualism holds that the justifiability of action matters in its own right. On this basis, principles that leave individuals free to ignore climate change could reasonably be rejected by its victims. In advancing this argument, contractualism still faces at least two major challenges: the problem of probability and the so‐called aggregation problem. But there is no reason to think these cannot be overcome. The effort is worthwhile, for contractualism would then counter the scepticisms much more convincingly than either act consequentialism or unguarded moral intuition ever could.