The Moral Inefficacy of Carbon Offsetting

Bibliographic Data

ID21293743
AuthorsTyler M John (0000-0002-9381-0023, Rutgers University—New Brunswick), Amanda Askell (New York University), Heather Wilkinson (0000-0001-8570-3351, University of Oxford)
Year2024
Volume102
Issue4
Pages795-813
Publication date2024-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAustralasian Journal of Philosophy (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0004-8402 • E-ISSN: 1470-6828
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00048402.2024.2328639
OpenAlexW4396559802
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited25

Many real-world agents recognise that they impose harms by choosing to emit carbon, for example, by flying.Yet many do so anyway, and then attempt to make things right by offsetting those harms.Such offsetters typically believe that, by offsetting, they change the deontic status of their behaviour, making an otherwise impermissible action permissible.Do they succeed in practice?Some philosophers have argued that they do, since their offsets appear to reverse the adverse effects of their emissions.But we show that they do not.In practice, standard carbon offsetting does not reverse the harms of the original action, nor does it even benefit the same group as was harmed.Standard moral theories hence deny that such offsetting succeeds.Indeed, we show that any moral theory that allows offsetting in this setting faces a dilemma between allowing any wrong to be offset, no matter how grievous, and recognising an implausibly sharp discontinuity between offsettable actions and non-offsettable actions.The most plausible response is to accept that carbon offsetting fails to right our climate wrongs

Action (physics) · Deontic logic · Dilemma · Economics · Epistemology · Law and economics · Moral dilemma · Climate Change and Geoengineering · Innovation, Sustainability, Human-Machine Systems · Philosophy · Psychology · Risk Perception and Management · Social Psychology

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