The philosophical debate on individual responsibilities to address the threat of global warming has focused on the problem that any individual’s personal emissions reductions will have virtually no impact on the environmental problem. This is thought by some to make it difficult to justify individual obligations to make emissions reductions under current conditions of political inertia. On this view, individuals chiefly have obligations to support collective political efforts to address the threat of global warming. In response, others have attempted to identify indirect reasons grounded in virtue ethics for individuals to act unilaterally. In this paper I first argue that even if individual emissions cannot make climate change worse in a morally important way they can in a direct way have morally important impacts prior to effective government action. This is by unfairly exploiting what remains of a safe global emissions budget. Still, on my account it is difficult to establish moral obligations to reduce personal emissions. Not because it is only collective efforts that can be effective but because a set of radically non-ideal cooperation problems makes it unlikely that states will in fact heavily constrain GHG emissions. Without such constraints individual level arguments for fair use do not get off the ground. These radically non-ideal conditions also, I claim, undermine attempts grounded in virtue ethics to establish obligations to reduce personal emissions. Despite this decidedly pessimistic assessment, I do defend the view that individuals have obligations to politically support collective efforts. However, I argue that the specific form obligatory support takes must be responsive to our radically non-ideal conditions. An obligation to ‘vote green’ can satisfy this requirement while more demanding forms of advocacy cannot be obligatory under current conditions.
