Climate Change, Right and Kant

The fact of climate change threatens the right is many parts of the world, and variously. The rising sea level and the alarming frequency of crop failures, for instance, force people to migrate from one state to another, which not only diminishes their agency for maintaining the civil condition (which is “itself an end,” according to Kant) but rather also wrongs the cosmopolitan right of several others to visit anywhere on the earth (which follows from their “common possession” of the earth). These violations do not get the attention they should, perhaps because the crisis is itself created by rational agents who while acting in their own interests cause a sub-optimal outcome. This is the “tragedy” of the commons, and quite worryingly, the benefits and burdens of climate change are not shared equitably among individual states. The crisis has only got bigger in our time, and the negotiations under the UN have done little to bring all stakeholders on the same page, not to mention their differing perceptions of the crisis itself. Kant’s approach to the problem of climate change, I suggest, must be based on “immediate respect” for the right, which alone can make states “cooperate” in a stable manner. I will explore this further in this paper.