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Moral Issues

Collective Action & Climate Change

Nevin Chellappah says we can’t dodge responsibility by our effects being small.

A common response climate activists face when they ask people to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions is: “My individual emissions make no difference to the harms done by climate change, so I have no moral reason to reduce my emissions.” This argument is problematic given the current threat climate change poses for our lives, for it could lead to apathy and defeatism about the climate crisis. It raises the problem of collective impact, which concerns how the aggregation of individually inconsequential actions can produce a morally bad outcome overall.

First, I shall formally set out the argument against us having a moral reason to reduce our individual emissions. Then, I’ll argue against the argument’s first premise, demonstrating that individual emissions have non-zero expected effects on a chaotic weather system.

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