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Earth from the International Space Station
Earth from the International Space Station (NASA/Reid Wiseman 2014)
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Meradjuddin Oidermaa & Mac Willners: Exacerbating Climate Change. Accountability Under Compound Overdetermination

Research

On Wednesday, 4 April, the joint seminar in theoretical & practical philosophy features a presentation by Meradjuddin Oidermaa & Mac Willners (Stockholm university).

Seminar
Date
4 Mar 2026
Time
13:15 - 15:00
Location
Renströmsgatan 6, sal J577

Organizer
Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science

Abstract

Many pressing ethical challenges share a common structural feature: they involve large-scale harms marked by overdetermination. Climate change, we argue, instantiates the uniquely challenging case of compound overdetermination. This provides a unified diagnosis for the failures of prominent attempts to impute meaningful accountability to individual emitters. We then develop a novel account that succeeds where others fail. On the exacerbation view, agents are accountable not for whether climate-related outcomes occur, but for how their emissions affect the moral status of others’. Each emission embeds others’ emissions in a more harmful realized trajectory. Even under compound overdetermination, these worsening relations are genuine, discrete, and in aggregate substantial.