Meradjuddin Oidermaa & Mac Willners: Exacerbating Climate Change. Accountability Under Compound Overdetermination

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.