Ecotage: Whose Property Should We Destroy?

A number of authors have recently argued that it can, under certain circumstances, be permissible to destroy property for the sake of promoting environmental ends. In defence of ecotage, appeals have been made to utilitarian considerations (Martin 1990), fairness (Lai and Lim 2023), the logic of defensive harm (Arridge 2023), and extant political justifications of civil disobedience (Delmas 2018 and Lai 2019). There has been little attempt, however, to apply these abstract justifications concretely to ascertain who, if anyone, is liable to having their property destroyed by acts of ecotage—a practical-ethical task of urgent interest to activists and concerned citizens currently engaged in climate resistance. This paper begins to rectify this neglect by combining empirical work on carbon accounting with philosophical work on responsibility to develop a six-place schema for determining whether some piece of property is an appropriate target of ecotage, before applying this schema to reach conclusions about who, exactly, is liable to having their property destroyed.