Global climate change: interests of foreigners in civil disobedience

Abstract

This paper is a reflection on the article by John Lemons and Donald A. Brown: Global climate change and non-violent civil disobedience (Lemons & Brown 2011, this issue). The authors suggest that ‘a new approach to bring about action [on global climate change] might be required’: namely, non-violent civil disobedience (NVCD). For this purpose, they proposed that their arguments and lines of discussion should be a ‘conversation starter’ because the idea of civil disobedience ‘has not been dealt with in the scientific or environmental peer-reviewed literature and because, [...] it warrants discussion.’ (Lemons & Brown 2011, p. 3). For the most part, non-violent civil disobedience is preoccupied with the idea of political obligation. Generated from ‘special bonds’ that people may have in a community — whether by consent, by being a member of a political group or benefiting from it — it is claimed that individuals have an obligation towards the state and to each other. On the other hand, the legitimate authority in the prescriptive sense entails a moral right to command and, the right to be obeyed (Wolff 1970). The demand of the state to be obeyed logically correlates to the citizen’s political obligations (Simmons 1999) and is defined ‘to be obligations of obedience and support owed to one particular government or community (our own), above all others’ (Simmons 1996, p. 250). In standard terminology, according to Thomas Nagel, this is an associative obligation when ‘justice is something we owe through our shared institutions only to those with whom we stand in a strong political relation’ (Nagel 2005, p. 121). Furthermore, when it concerns one’s duty owed to each other irrespective of institutional affiliations, these associative obligations or special ties among co-citizenries are not necessarily in contradiction with those of cosmopolitan requirements for ‘individualism, universality and generality’ (Pogge 1992, p. 48–49). Besides the climate adaptation fund which is sponsored by developed nations, for example, new and additional financing of climate change for developing nations ‘refers to the idea that financial resources raised for one objective, such as climate change, should not substitute or divert funding from other important objectives, in particular economic and social development’ (Moncel et al. 2009, p. 5). However, these guiding principles in transnational political duty are in order to support each other, and they ‘ought to be formulated and applied through a collective political authority. Otherwise, however well-intended, these [...] claims will always result unilaterally and consequently fail to be binding’ (Ypi 2010, p. 178). Similarly, ‘these principles should be those that one would choose for one’s own political society. This is something like Rawls’s original position’ (Miller 2010, p. 1785). Following such internally1 demanding requirements, when a duty to support co-citizenries is stronger compared with foreigners, I shall first address civil disobe-