The Pivotal Generation: Why We Have a Moral Responsibility to Slow Climate Change Right Now A Précis

Giving It Our All? Demandingness in the Pivotal Generation

DOI: 10.17473/2240-7987-2024-1-1 Henry Shue makes a powerful case for the ‘active many’ within the current generation to act urgently and ‘robustly’ on climate change. This is because the climate burdens born by future generations – heavy enough in any case – will be heavier still if we don’t; the threats are potentially unlimited; and harms could ...
Elizabeth Cripps

Being Pivotal: History, Fairness, and Political Action

DOI 10.17473/2240-7987-2024-1-2 In this article, we critically engage with Henry Shue’s insightful book The Pivotal Generation. We will focus predominantly on the book’s first two chapters as well as the final chapter, in which Shue justifies the claim that we are the pivotal generation and relates it to discussions of (historical) responsibility. More concretely, we engage in his ...
Lukas Sparenborg & Darrel Moellendorf

Being Pivotal for Carbon Dioxide Removal

DOI: 10.17473/2240-7987-2024-1-3 According to Henry Shue, everyone alive today is part of the ‘pivotal generation’, meaning that they have a special responsibility to mitigate climate change. One way to mitigate climate change is through carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies. CDR technologies include a range of measures, from afforestation to filtering carbon dioxide from the ...
Hanna Schübel

Is It Morally Justifiable To Pass on Part of the Costs of Pivotal Climate Action to Future Generations?

DOI: 10.17473/2240-7987-2024-1-4 In The Pivotal Generation (2021), Henry Shue provides compelling normative reasons for members of the present generation to take pivotal climate action: the last remaining hopes that global warming will not spiral out of control lie with them. In this article, I address the question of whether the present generation should bear both the implementation ...
Fausto Corvino

Who has a moral responsibility to slow climate change?

DOI: 10.17473/2240-7987-2024-1-5 The current humans are the first ones to recognise that action is required on climate change, but the urgency makes us also possibly the last generation to be able to act before major threats are aggravated. I applaud the general message of an urgent call for action in Shue’s book but find that the brushstrokes used for identifying those responsible are a ...
Säde Hormio

The relational dimension of climate action

DOI: 10.17473/2240-7987-2024-1-6 Henry Shue’s The Pivotal Generation reminds us that our duty to do something about climate change is based on a set of very basic duties: a duty to not to impose terrible risks on others and a duty to stop doing so once you find that your actions have this effect and counteract the relevant risks. Furthermore, it alerts us that as we – the currently ...
Alexa Zellentin

A Reply to Commentators

DOI: 10.17473/2240-7987-2024-1-7 The discussants have insightfully pursued a number of important issues, including the following: how demanding the urgent duties to slow climate change are; the role of fairness in explaining the historical responsibility of the nations with the greatest cumulative emissions; the extent to which corporate self-interest can be mobilized to support carbon dioxide ...
Henry Shue

Invisible Harm to Distant Future People: A Reflection on Long-term Climate Change Effect

DOI: 10.17473/2240-7987-2024-1-8 On a business-as-usual policy, it seems inevitable that people in the distant future will live in a world with a more harmful climate. But can we really harm distant future people? If so, to what extent can we harm them? Derek Parfit’s non-identity problem (1984) has been taken by other scholars, such as David Boonin (2014), to support the idea that, as ...
Jingsi Teng

Climate Finance, Justice, and Political Realism: Shue versus Broome and Foley

DOI: 10.17473/2240-7987-2024-1-9 Extraordinarily high levels of funding, together with action on many other fronts, are needed for achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement. According to John Broome and Duncan Foley, global decarbonization requires that fossil fuel assets be bought up, which requires establishing a new international financial institution, a World Climate Bank (WCB). However, as ...
Alyssa R. Bernstein

Hope for a Burning World: Climate Nihilism and Therapeutic Hope

DOI: 10.17473/2240-7987-2024-1-10 A growing number of young people have responded to the repeated failure of the world’s richest countries to accomplish what is needed to prevent climate catastrophes with “climate nihilism” or “doomism”: the attitude that further climate disasters are inevitable and climate activism is pointless. This epistemic point leads the ...
Christine Susienka & Gordon Purves