November 26, 2025 @ 16h00 – 17h30 CET
This week we discussed chapter 3, “In Search for a Justified Rectificatory Justice Principle,” and chapter 4, “Reasons Awaiting Satisfaction,” of Laura García-Portela’s Rectifying Climate Injustice: Reparations for Loss and Damage (2024). The starting point is a familiar trend in the climate-justice literature: the attempt to allocate responsibility for historical emissions in ways that go beyond blameworthiness. The commonly proposed solution is the Beneficiary Pays Principle (BPP), which assigns burdens to those who benefit from emission-generating activities.
In the two chapters, the author argues that what matters for reparation duties are the reasons left unsatisfied when harmful actions occur, whether or not agents were blameworthy at the time. García-Portela endorses the Polluter Pays Principle (PPP) in a form attentive not only to responsibility but also to the need for taking care after wrongdoing, especially when human rights have been tampered with.
Although the PPP and the BPP might end up identifying the same agents as responsible, they do so for different reasons: one tracing responsibility to wrongdoing, the other to the ongoing possession of benefits derived from it. Even as the relative share of historical emissions shrinks, both principles remain relevant and at the center of climate policy, especially in light of the increasing precision of attribution studies.
A significant part of the discussion centered on agency. Responsibility accounts in moral philosophy usually focus on individuals, posing the challenge of fitting such accounts to the cases of nation-states and collective agents. Thus, in García-Portela’s account, individuals inherit collective responsibilities by virtue of belonging to a group. This raises questions about how responsibility is distributed within the group: membership in a group, such as a state, does not entail equal participation in its emission-producing activities. Indeed, many marginalised communities did not contribute to pollution in the same ways, or to the same extent, as more privileged members. Historical injustices may eventually be superseded, but as long as individuals are committed to forward-looking accounts of justice, they must accept the responsibilities and their duties coming along with past wrongs.
While the chapters we read did not discuss what climate reparation should involve, in other chapters, García-Portela suggests that it must go beyond financial compensation. She highlights the importance of addressing non-economic loss and damage, and distinguishes between repairing what matters to victims and repairing the damaged relationship between harmer and harmed.
Organisers: Sapna Kumar and Futura Venuto