Are Just Mitigation Policies More Feasible Than Unjust Ones? A Provisional "No"

It is widely acknowledged that perceived fairness is key to mitigation policies’ acceptability. Insofar as perceived fairness tracks real fairness, this suggests that justice and feasibility go hand in hand in climate mitigation. Yet, it is unclear whether judgments about policies’ fairness are consistent in a way that allows for predictability and normative assessment. This paper examines the relation between policy instruments’ acceptability and their normative status. Its aim is to find out whether judgments about mitigation policies’ acceptability can be explained by commitment to any specific normative conception of justice. Drawing on empirical data and normative analysis, I assess general trends in policy preferences by help of three normative outlooks: egalitarianism, utilitarianism and libertarianism. I conclude that mitigation policy preferences do not fully align with any of these. In particular, such preferences stand in sharp tension to the egalitarian conception of justice most strongly committed to fairness and equality. My findings cast doubt over the proposed correlation between justice and feasibility in climate mitigation, and suggest that the fairness perceptions identified in the literature are either inconsistent or trumped by other considerations.