A Framework for a Compensatory Climate Justice for “Loss and Damage”: Making Victims Subjectively as Well Off as they were from an Agent-Centred Approach

The most prominent principles for the allocation of duties to avert anthropogenic climate change are the Polluters Pay Principle (PPP), the Ability to Pay Principle (APP) and the Beneficiaries Pay Principle (BPP). All these principles differ in the way they are related to two concepts of responsibility: backward-looking and forward-looking. As a consequence of that, they give support to different ways of understanding climate justice, either as distributive or compensatory justice. My proposal is a defense of a qualified BPP . This principle has the advantage of giving an account of our intuitions regarding the role that the moral significance of historic injustices should play in the development of climate justice (Caney, 2006), while it avoids the serious objections posed to the PPP. A qualified BPP connects the backward and forward-looking faces of responsibility in the context of climate justice. One of my main points will be that such a link allows the BPP to hold a compensatory view of justice, which allows to incorporate certain aspects and demands of climate justice that cannot be met by the other principles. In a nutshell, I argue that those who have benefited from historical emissions, despite not being morally responsible or blameworthy for them, are affected by a phenomenological aspect of responsibility acquired through their factual embedment and participation in unjust systemic structures. This participation and embeddedness connects them with the past wrongs that brought about the unjust social, political and economic structures they are currently living in. Such a connection involves a backward-looking dimension of responsibility, which can be theorized as “moral taint”. This impels them to contribute to amend those past injustices by means of compensation, that is, to comply with forward-looking responsibilities that incorporate a recognition of the moral significance of historic injustices.