Climate change throws up a range of benefits and burdens that have, in recent years, become the subject of considerable philosophical debate. A central tension has emerged between those who think that the burdens of climate change should be allocated in a way that broadly tracks nation’s responsibilities for bringing the threat about; and those who reject such arguments in favour of an emphasis on their respective capabilities. Those who follow the historical approach (often captured by the Polluter Pays Principle) charge that to ignore the early emissions of the developed word would be to miss something of fundamental moral import. The principle of common but differentiated responsibility, they argue, mandates that developed nations recognise the significance of their past overuse of the atmosphere. In contrast, those who take capabilities to represent better grounds for climatic obligations, tend to raise concerns about the permissibility of holding current individuals responsible for the costs of historical acts in which they played no part.
It is in this context that a third, and relatively novel approach has emerged to burden sharing, known as the beneficiary approach. The basic thought holds that historical emissions are still significant at least in the sense that many across the world continue to enjoy their benefits. What justice demands, on this argument, is for the agents to relinquish their benefits (or a portion thereof) toward climate change mitigation and adaptation. The Beneficiary Pays Principle has obvious appeal. Many find it intuitively plausible and, at first glance, it appears a neat way to marry the concerns about responsibility and capability into one argument. In this paper, however, I would like to draw attention to some problems with this account and warn against a premature conclusion. Specifically I will take up three strands of argument. Firstly, from where does the BPP draw its fundamental normative support? Secondly, how does the BPP sit with our developed ideas on distributive justice? Finally, and building on the preceding strands, how can we formulate a plausible BPP in the context of climate change?
