Elizabeth Cripps (Edinburgh): Justice, Integrity and the Green Parenting Duty

PROCEEDINGS OF THE ARISTOTELIAN SOCIETY CHAIRED BY TIM CRANE EDITED BY GUY LONGWORTH

SENATE HOUSE UNIVERSIT Y OF LONDON

Justice, Integrity and the Green Parenting Duty ELIZABE TH C R I P P S U NIVE R S I T Y OF E D I N B U RGH

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justice, integrity and the green parenting duty

elizabeth cripps university of edinburgh

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biography Elizabeth Cripps is a senior lecturer in political theory at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Climate Change and the Moral Agent: Individual Duties in an Interdependent World (Oxford, 2013), which defends a ‘weakly collective’ moral duty to act on climate change and explores the implications for individual duties. She currently works on population, climate change and justice, and on the intersect between climate duties and parents’ duties to their children. editorial note The following paper is a draft version that can only be cited or quoted with the author’s permission. The final paper will be published in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Issue No. 1, Volume CXVII (2017). Please visit the Society’s website for subscription information: aristoteliansociety.org.uk.

justice, integrity and the green parenting duty elizabeth cripps

i.

THIS PAPER ARGUES that parents owe it to their children to bring them up to be good global climate citizens. This special duty, which I will call the green parenting duty, has three components. It involves educating children about harmful anthropogenic climate change, including teaching them that this is an injustice to which they, as future moral agents, will have a duty to respond. It also requires involving children in promoting effective collective action on mitigation and adaptation. As a part of this, and very likely independently, parents should reduce the family carbon footprint. These will be referred to as the climate education duty, the promotional lifestyle duty, and the green lifestyle duty.

Four possible arguments are canvassed, with increasing success. The first (Section II) expands an existing argument for the parental duty to cultivate one’s child’s moral capacity, to spare them social and institutional penalties in adulthood. Section III appeals to the child’s future need for moral integrity, or at least the capacity for such integrity. On the final argument (Section IV), failure to fulfil the green parenting duty would undermine the quality of the parent-child relationship, given that the parent is also a moral agent with climate duties. Sections V and VI deal with objections.

In order to address this complex topic in a limited space, I start with some assumptions, all from established literatures. I assume that parents have a special duty to meet children’s physical and emotional needs in childhood and to prepare them for adulthood in their community.1 This includes ensuring that they receive an education, and cultivating the capacities necessary for flourishing. I also assume that the present and future human suffering caused by anthropogenic climate change constitutes a collective moral failure, generating shared or ‘weakly collective’2 duties to organise to prevent or redress it. This can be defended negatively, via collective responsibility for harm, or via a positive duty to organise to protect 1 Brighouse and Swift 2014: 62-66; Noggle 2002. I assume that these duties are genuinely associative: owed by parents to children by virtue of their relationship (Macleod 2010: 142; Seglow 2010: 55-57.) However, I remain neutral between causal and intentionalist or voluntarist accounts of their acquisition. (Blustein 1997; Archard 2010; O’Neill 1979; Blake 2010.)

2 Cripps 2013: 3.

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basic human interests.3 Such collective action will impose constraints on individuals, which might be called climate justice duties. However, individuals also have climate justice duties in the absence of a coherent collective scheme. One is the duty to promote collective action (at various levels) to end the harm or protect the interests.4 This may require cutting one’s own emissions.5 Somewhat controversial but still widely defended is the duty to minimise individual emissions independently of the impact on wider change.6 I must also stress what I am not doing, which is to offer a comprehensive account of the relationship between climate change and parental duties. Such duties – individual or collective – might be defended by virtue of the physical threat posed by climate change to those parents’ own children.7 A green parenting duty (although not a special duty) might be derived from the shared duty to tackle climate change, given the importance of getting the next generation on board.8 The green lifestyle duty might also be defended on the basis that parents shouldn’t accustom children to an emissions-reliant lifestyle that must become unavailable if climate change is mitigated.9 Rather than pursue these themes, this paper asks what the parent owes her child as a future moral agent.10 ii.

It is regularly contended that parents owe it to their children to develop their moral capacity. Perhaps, then, the green parenting duty can be de3 Although intuitively plausible, some expansion of traditional moral thought is required to collectivise the underlying principles. (Cripps 2013: 48-51, 66-77; Kutz 2000: 171-91; Goodin 1985: 134-41; Shue 1980: 35-64; Ashford 2006.)

4 Cripps 2013: 141-50; Sinnott-Armstrong 2005; Johnson 2003; Broome 2012: 73-4.

5 Cripps 2013: 151-55; Hourdequin 2010.

6 Baatz 2014; Broome 2012: 73-96; Garvey 2010, 2011; Cripps Forthcoming.

7 Cripps Unpublished 8 Relatedly, see Hursthouse 2007. A further duty might be to have fewer children. (E.g.

Conly 2015.)

9 IPCC 2014: 18. This argument fails: the next generation of adults could, especially collectively, find ways of either satisfying central interests through other activities or enabling similar activities without emissions. There are exceptions (e.g. those whose lifestyles revolve around long distance, high speed travel) but this supports not so much a green lifestyle duty as an adaptive lifestyle duty: a duty not to render one’s child too dependent on one very specific way of life.

10 For more on the three perspectives from which a human being faces the world, see Cripps 2013: 170-75, inspired by Nagel 1991: 1-10. I speak of the ‘moral perspective’ for convenience throughout this paper, although it should properly be the ‘impersonally moral perspective’ to distinguish general moral duties from those (like those defended here) to one’s intimates. Such duties are, of course, also moral.

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fended as a special duty in the same way as the duty to teach one’s child not to go around shooting people.11 Unfortunately, it cannot, at least not so straightforwardly. Two arguments from the literature will be considered: one here, and one in the next section. The first appeals pragmatically to the child’s need to live in society, pointing out that ‘social institutions tend to reward moral behaviour’,12 or that children need a sense of justice to thrive in a society where their opportunities are constrained by collectively determined justice.13 However, if this is the only reason for developing one’s child’s moral capacity, a green parenting duty does not automatically follow. Opportunities in affluent societies are not constrained by global or intergenerational justice, even understood minimally as avoiding serious harm. There are no ‘serious consequences’14 for those who ignore climate justice. So considering only the prospects for one’s own children, why not simply render them capable of flourishing in the current unjust world? Leave them with the narrowest of nationalist moralities – no individual harms to individual others, positive justice within the state and generation – but indifferent to collective harm or failure to aid beyond that.

To defend a green parenting duty in this pragmatic way, we must appeal to the chance that climate justice will be incorporated into social and institutional arrangements. Then, the adult child could face social and institutional penalties for failing to fulfil duties which, if he is ill-informed about climate change and has been encouraged uncritically to accept the status quo, he might find it difficult to perform. However, this argument is weakened by the fact that such collective action is by no means guaranteed: the child may never face such constraints. Even if collective action does happen, it could be focused disproportionately on protecting the next few generations in the developed world, rather than institutionalise cross-border moral duties. This is, in any case, a limited argument for green parenting, as it does not require enabling children to try to bring about collective implementation of climate justice.

iii.

On another argument, the child needs the parent to cultivate his moral capacity because individual interests and moral agency are inseparable.

11 The duty to develop one’s child’s moral capacity could be derived from duties to third persons, but this is not the focus here.

12 Brighouse and Swift 2014: 64 See also Noggle 2002: 110-12 13 Clayton 2006: 110-12 14 Brighouse 2002: 42.

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However, this can be read in more than one way. On option 1, a flourishing life, properly understood, requires moral integrity: it must be lived within moral boundaries.15 This is apparently intended by at least some in the literature.16 On option 2, it is necessary for flourishing that the individual has the capacity to fulfil the duties of a moral agent, but not that he actually do so.

The green parenting duty would follow on option 1. From the perspective of the moral agent, human suffering gives us central reason for action: reason not, collectively or individually to cause such harm, and reason to prevent it. Thus, for full flourishing, the individual must be taught and enabled to fulfil her climate duties. However, many would be uncomfortable with this view of individual interests. It means accepting that most current lives in affluent states are not fully flourishing because of failure to respond to collective harm and basic injustice. It means telling many US Republicans or UKIP supporters that they are wrong about what is in their own interests: that a world in which future generations will die from heat waves or borders exclude the destitute is a world in which they, standing by those borders or driving their SUVs, are worse off. It is tempting to bite that bullet,17 just as it is to say that slave owners, living off the suffering of others, could not have had fully flourishing lives.18 However, it remains highly controversial.

Let us turn, then, to option 2. Even though some persons may flourish perfectly well without leading morally good lives, it remains the case that we are moral agents as well as individuals with our own interests and relationships. As such, I contend that children are owed the capacity for moral integrity.

We might make the general claim – still controversial, but less than that above – that any human being is made worse off by lacking the ability, or understanding, to act morally. I find this suggestion plausible, but need not rely on it. The present argument can also be made by appeal to the significant likelihood that any given individual will come to be motivated by the moral perspective, to the extent that her values and plan of life do depend on behaving as she should. Parents, knowing this, must render their child capable of moral flourishing in case he should come to identify himself as such. Note, however, that this does not entail the general claim 15 Or as much within them as compatible with the individual’s situation. (Dworkin 2000: 270.)

16 Harry Brighouse 2002: 42. However, writing with Adam Swift, he is more equivocal.

(Brighouse and Swift 2014: 64.) See also e.g. Dworkin 2000: 263-67; Clayton 2006: 143.

17 Dworkin 2000: 265-7.

18 Analogy from Macleod 2010: 147.

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that a parent must equip him for success in any plan of life he may light upon, for example provide training to become a leading musician and coaching fit for a world class swimmer. In terms of both probability and compatibility with providing a flourishing childhood in other ways, this is a special case.

What, in the present context, would this require of parents? Some climate education would be needed, and enough promotional experience to enable the child to fulfil climate duties as an adult. Moreover, pervasive conflict between the three human perspectives – the personal, the interpersonal, and the moral – could make it very hard, in practice, to do the right thing. Such conflict could also be psychologically difficult to live with for those motivated by all three perspectives, giving parents a duty to spare their children if they can.19 This counts against inculcating an ideological commitment to a fossil fuels lifestyle. (Consider the plight of the slave owner’s child, brought up believing in the institution of slavery as part of the fabric of her way of life, but later motivated by considerations of equal human moral worth.)20 However, it also counts in favour of a duty less specific to green parenting: a duty not to render one’s child so dependent on one narrowly defined way of life (for example, ‘addicted’ to air travel) that she would seriously struggle to adapt to changed circumstances. We might call this an adaptable lifestyle duty.21 This, then, is a defence of some elements of the green parenting duty.

Appeal to moral integrity might possibly take us further still: to a more extensive promotional lifestyle duty or a green lifestyle duty. However, this would require accepting that it impinges on a child’s moral integrity to live, as a child, a life which would be immoral if lived by an adult.22 This goes well beyond the accepted view of moral accountability as requiring both agency and avoidability, and I will not try to defend it here.23 Instead, I turn to my final argument.

19 Cripps 2013: 180-96.

20 Note that this second argument need not depend on the child becoming morally motivated: climate harms will almost certainly include harms to his own children and grandchildren, so he need only be motivated by interpersonal considerations.

21 See also footnote 9.

22 For an intriguing related argument against feeding children meat, see Butt Unpublished.

23 To make such a case for a green lifestyle duty one would have also to accept the view (left open in Section 1) that adults are wrong not to minimize their own emissions even where this would make no difference to collective action on climate change. (Cripps 2013: 115-39; Baatz 2014; Sinnott-Armstrong 2005; Broome 2012: 73-96; Garvey 2010, 2011; Cripps Forthcoming; Hourdequin 2010; Johnson 2003.)

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iv.

Parents are not only parents: they are also moral agents. As such, they have duties to pursue an end to the ongoing collective harm done through climate change by the global elite.24 Such harm is a collective violation of perhaps the most basic moral rule – the no-harm principle – but can also be condemned as collective failure to protect basic human interests. So much was taken as read in Section I. Given this, the green parenting duty can be defended.

It is worth re-stressing what kind of argument this is. It is not: given that parents have duties to promote climate justice, they owe it to the victims of climate change to train their children to do the same. Rather, given that parents have these moral duties and that they owe a certain intimate, flourishing-promoting relationship to their children, they owe it to them to bring them up as good global climate citizens.

A preliminary observation is this. ‘Familial relationship goods’, with their combination of intimacy and mutual identification, contribute uniquely to the well-being of both parent and child.25 If climate duties are fulfilled, climate justice may become a significant part of parents’ lives and shared participation in (say) promoting community climate action could itself be a valuable familial relationship good. Indeed, there could be a cost in terms of such goods if children are not made part of the campaigning or green living of their parents: ‘Without substantial opportunity to share himself intimately with his child, in ways that reflect his own judgements about what is valuable, the parent is deprived of the ability to forget and maintain an intimate relationship, and the child is deprived of that relationship.’26 However, my primary argument goes further than this. It is also less contingent, as it does not suggest that without the green parenting duty sufficient familial relationship goods could not be secured. The point is, rather, that the possibility of a properly valued and valuable relationship is undermined if the parent fulfilling climate justice duties does not also fulfil the green parenting duty, because this would be incompatible with the parent fully recognising and valuing the child as a human being like herself.

Children do not become moral agents overnight. Rather, there is a 24 Cripps 2013: 48-51, 66-77; Goodin 1985: 134-41; Shue 1980: 35-64; Gardiner 2011.

25 Brighouse and Swift 2014: 110. A paradigm case of such shared activities is reading bedtime stories. See also e.g. Macleod 2002: 215.

26 Brighouse and Swift 2014: 125.

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process of transition, with increased moral understanding and greater responsibility. Consider, then, an older child going through this process.

Suppose he knows that his parents are trying to bring about climate justice – learning, from this if from nothing else, that this is something that they accept should be done – but has had neither encouragement nor support from those parents to become part of this important work himself.

Suppose he has not even been taught enough to understand why they do what they do, nor helped to develop interests conducive either to bringing about or flourishing in such a world. Consider his situation as he reflects on this, and on what it means in terms of the relationship his parents see themselves as having with him.

In failing to help her child to understand and be capable of pursuing the goals that she acknowledges and pursues as a moral agent, the parent is failing fully to acknowledge and value that child both as her child, on whose development she has an unequalled influence, and as a fellow human being and so future moral agent.27 It is one thing for a parent to go off mountain biking, or to French classes, and say to her child: “Yes, this is something I’m into, but it doesn’t matter whether you do it or not.” It is quite another for her to say: “I’m going to fight climate injustice, because I identify myself as a moral agent, with a moral duty to prevent the serious suffering of other human beings.

But I don’t see why I should make you part of that, help you to understand why it’s important, or develop your capacity to do the same.”

Alongside the love and intimacy, respect is needed if any relationship is to flourish. Respecting a child is not the same as respecting an adult. It does not, of course, require giving the same weight to their current views.

Equally obviously, considerations of age-appropriateness and avoiding unnecessary emotional distress must be taken into account. (One does not give a three year-old graphic descriptions of the suffering of tsunami victims.) However, respecting a child does require fully acknowledging that they will grow into an adult human being. Such respect will be undermined if the parent fails, in their asymmetric interactions, to acknowledge the child as a future member of the global community of those who are entitled to equal basic moral consideration and required to show it to one another: a community in which, by fulfilling her climate duties, she 27 Paul Bou-Habib 2014 argues that the parent who flouts general moral duties to confer special advantage on her child fails to value that child properly, because she cannot value her for her individual worth whilst acting incompatibly with recognising the individual worth of others. The claim here is narrower: given their relationship with its unique capacity for influence, the parent cannot simultaneously acknowledge and perform her moral duties and properly value both her child as a human being and future moral agent, without trying to enable him to understand and fulfil the same duties.

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acknowledges and affirms her own place. To make the point stark with a small-scale example, imagine being told by your mother or father: “Oh yes, I saved Person A’s life – it was what I should do, given our common humanity – but you needn’t worry about saving Person B, in the same situation. It doesn’t matter whether you know how to respond appropriately to moral need.”

v.

The next two sections deal with two probable objections. The first is that the argument in Section IV is wrongly set up because it treats parents’ climate duties as background against which to establish their parental duties.

Rather, there is widely held perception that the reverse holds: parents can prioritise doing what is best for their children and only then have to worry about broader duties of justice. I will argue that this objection fails.28 In justifying expending resources in fulfilling parental duties, parents can appeal to the moral weight of their child’s interest in a flourishing childhood and in being capable of flourishing as an adult. A key part of this – crucial in generating any rights that parents, in particular, have to prioritise their own children – is the role and value of the relationship itself.29 However, there is a difference between providing some threshold level of such goods – sufficient for a “good” life and loving, intimate, respectful relationship – and maximising the child’s well being above that.

Whether or not parents can justify stinting on general duties of justice to secure this threshold level flourishing for their children, there is nothing in the significance of the relationship or the need for some core familial relationship goods, to justify open-ended parental partiality above the level.30 Given this, if a parent could fulfil her parental duties up to this threshold level in two different ways, only one of which also fulfilled her thirdparty moral duties, she should take this path. Thus, assuming both are compatible with securing her child’s threshold level flourishing, she should pursue climate justice and fulfil the green parenting duty rather than fail to do so and bring her child up unmotivated by climate justice. If the sketch above is plausible – and I hope to have said enough to put the burden of argument on those defending prioritising parental partiality above the 28 I draw from and build on recent work on legitimate parental partiality. (Brighouse and Swift 2014: 115-48; Macleod 2010, 2002.)

29 Schrag 2008: 200-08; Brighouse and Swift 2014: 71-76.

30 Parents are likely required not to fulfil duties to their children at all if that means doing serious individual harm to others. However, individual participation in collective harms may be more like failures of positive duties in this respect. (Cripps 2013: 155-57.)

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threshold level – she should do so even if the other way of fulfilling her parental duty would further boost the relationship and the child’s prospects.31 For the objection to hold, then, it must be impossible for a parent to fulfil her climate duties and fulfil her parental duties to threshold level. As a general claim about the difficulty of devoting any resources and effort to climate justice without neglecting one’s child, this can be rejected (at least for affluent parents). This is especially so given the scope for developing familial relationship goods through shared fulfilment of climate duties.

However, there is another version, which is an objection not only to Section IV but to the green parenting duty more generally. Just because a parent is promoting climate justice doesn’t mean it will happen. Why, then, should she motivate her child to pursue the same goal? Is not she preparing him for a life of constant frustration, as he flails hopelessly against the collective evils of the world?

This makes an important point. Collective failure to address pervasive harm might leave morally motivated individuals struggling to live fully at peace with themselves. Even if they do all that a reasonable account of moral duties can require of them, they will always be aware of the very great unmet suffering, and from the moral perspective have reason to go on doing – and sacrificing - more. This could further boost the case for collective action.32 At the individual level, recalling the adaptive lifestyle duty, a case might be made for not bringing up one’s child to care only about climate justice, to the extent that he would regard his own life as a failure if it weren’t achieved.

However, this does not show that the individual motivated by climate justice cannot live an adequately flourishing life in an unjust world, or – at least – that her prospects would be better if she were not so motivated.

Even if global climate justice continues elusive, the parent is not signing her child up to an isolated life committed to pursuing some esoteric and utterly implausible end, or to one which he must devote all his energies.

She is enabling him to understand the moral wrongness of the collective situation – something very many people do already appreciate and around which communities are already being built – and accustoming him to acting as a moral agent. Indeed, building on Section III, fulfilling the green parenting duty reduces conflict between the three perspectives of human life. The child will grow up with less of a vested interest in the maintenance of the unjust status quo, is likely to forge relationships with those similarly motivated, and so will find it easier to fulfil his moral duties.

31 This response goes further than is needed, if Section III is right.

32 I make this claim in Cripps 2013: 170-96.

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vi.

The second objection is as follows. Parents are often held to have a duty to develop their children’s capacity for autonomy, as a key part of preparing them for adult life in their community. I think this is right. The very respect for the child as future fully fledged human being, stressed in Section IV, seems to require it. However, such a duty puts well documented obstacles in the path of religious or cultural upbringing.33 How, then, can parents justify shaping children’s values to the extent required to bring them up to be good global climate citizens?34 Let us begin by examining what is required to cultivate autonomy. On perhaps the most influential account, being autonomous is ‘being part author of one’s own life’. Individuals need adequate long and short-term options, as well as mental capacities, and freedom from coercion and manipulation.35 Thus, parents must enable their children to think and reflect rationally, to revise their own considered views where appropriate, and to engage critically but constructively with the views of others. This will include being prepared to question the judgement of those closest to them.

They will need psychological and perhaps physical strength.36 With this in mind, two responses to the objection suggest themselves.37 One is to acknowledge a conflict between bringing one’s child up as a good global climate citizen, and developing her capacity for autonomy, but argue that it is permissible in this instance to curb the scope for future autonomy. The other is to claim that the kind of autonomy we should value is moralised, so the conflict is illusory.38 My response lies somewhere between the two: the minimal moral conception underlying the green parenting duty must, if anything does, have the moral weight to pull against the end of securing autonomy, given that both are ultimately central to 33 E.g. Brighouse and Swift 2014: 168-73; Clayton 2006: 87-123; Callan 2002; Archard 2002; Noggle 2002: 113-15; Feinberg 1980: 131-38; McLaughlin 1984; Clayton 2012.

34 Note, however, that the autonomy objection is not usually taken to overcome the parent’s duty to develop her child’s moral capacity. E.g. Brighouse and Swift 2014: 151; McLaughlin 1984: 81.

35 Raz 1986: 369-78.

36 Archard 2010: 158; Brighouse and Swift 2014: 63-4, 164-68; Noggle 2002: 105.

37 In line with Clayton 2006: 142-3.

38 Entirely to resolve the objection, a very strong moralised reading would be needed, on which a person can retain valuable autonomy even if she faces only good options or if the viewpoint guiding her choice is one she has not reflectively endorsed. This is problematic because it might well be considered part of the development of valuable autonomy – indeed, part of developing her moral capacity – that she makes the right choice for herself.

(Raz 1986: 378-81; Clayton 2006: 143.)

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enabling a child to live a full human life among other human beings.39 However, because of the peculiar and minimal nature of that value system, the conflict between the two goals is much less than between developing autonomy and most religious views or cultural views.

Recall what climate education involves: teaching the broad facts on climate change, along with collectivised versions of about as uncontroversial a pair of moral principles as can be found. Virtually no-one would deny the prohibition on serious harm, while minimal positive duties are generally accepted even by ‘nationalist’ global justice theorists.40 Far from being a comprehensive conception of the good akin to deeply religious worldviews, this is minimal common ground hard to deny on any reasonable conception of the good, where ‘reasonable’ is understood as compatible with accepting all the other human beings with whom we share the world as entitled to basic moral consideration. 41 By the same token, there is no need for the kind of indoctrination that causes concern in some religious or cultural cases. Beyond that initial acceptance of the equal basic moral status of human beings, there is little that children are required to take on trust, or at least to continue to take on trust once capable of reflection. There are not the same gaps in reasoning or evidence to be closed or obscured by appeal to unquestioning faith. There is not the same fear of rational thought, debate, or exposure to other modes of thought, that leads some religious parents to reject elements of scientific education for their children.42 Rather, harmful anthropogenic climate change is recognised by more than 96 per cent of climate scientists.43 The collectivised no-harm principle and principle of beneficence follow so intuitively from the individual ver39 Robert Noggle argues that a sense of justice, as one of Rawls’ two moral powers, is a pre-primary good, required if a child is to become a functioning member of the moral community. (Noggle 2002: 101, 07-8.)

40 Nagel 2005: 130-32; Blake 2002: 259. See also Clayton 2006: 160-64.

41 This is a moralised, globalised but only minimally cosmopolitan understanding of the Rawlsian view that citizens need some mutually reasonable common ground to live together in society with limited resources and different tastes, wants, and comprehensive values. (Rawls 1993: xxxvii-xli.) Thus, the green parenting duty would pass the test set

by Matthew Clayton for the exercise of parental authority – that they could ‘defend their conduct in a manner that cannot reasonably be rejected by free and equal persons’ (Clayton 2006: 112) – so long as those ‘free and equal persons’ are taken to comprise humanity as a whole. Clayton himself takes a state-orientated approach to justice and legitimacy. However, the views may not be too far apart: he upholds a ‘minimal international morality’ and stresses the need to educate children to lobby for a just foreign policy (Clayton 2006: 163-5).

42 S. M. 2014. See also Feinberg 1980: 131-38.

43 Doran and Zimmerman 2009.

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sions that, anecdotally, I was regularly asked “Isn’t that obvious?” when explaining to non-philosophers my efforts to collectivise them.44 Moreover, climate duties could be defended on only one of these collectivised principles. There also remains scope for considered reflection and reasonable disagreement about appropriate responses: what exactly individuals should do to promote collective action, whether they have separate green lifestyle duties, and how effective collective action should be organised and individual duties allocated.45 Far from stifling the capacity for exercising their own considered judgement, those who grow up to fulfil climate duties will make regular use of it.46 There is, then, a strong enough distinction between comprehensive religious views and the principles of climate justice to undermine the autonomy objection. However, another distinction might helpfully be drawn, to avoid any confusion. Climate education, as defended here, seeks to pass on a minimal ‘green’ view, deriving its moral force from the serious human suffering caused by climate change. However, there are numerous other ‘green’ views, including some on which non-sentient animals, species, and ecosystems are themselves entitled to moral protection.47 These appeal to sometimes strong but not even near-universally shared intuitions about the intrinsic value of the non-human world.48 As such, there is scope to deny them and still be a reasonable member of the global moral community.

In relation to these views, parallel autonomy-based constraints could be defended as for religious views. Parents have interests in living their own lives and in a deep, valuable relationship with their children. Children require such a relationship for their own flourishing, and so need some sharing of activities and values. However, this should be curbed if it comes at the price of the child’s ability later to develop, revise and live by 44 In practice, our climate duties, like others to those distant in time or space, are often ignored. However, there are well-developed psychological explanations of this (Cripps 2013: 161-2, 92; Norgaard 2011; Stoll-Kleemann, O’Riordan, and Jaeger 2001). Thus, another spin on the argument of this paper would be that parents have a duty to educate their children to save them from acquiring socio-psychological ‘blocks’ to individual and collective moral progress. This observation also forestalls another objection: that what is owed is not climate education, but a more general moral education which the child could be left to apply to climate change.

45 Another argument for cultivating the child’s sense of climate justice, not explored here, would appeal to his right to an equal say in future decisions on how this collective project is to be carried out. (Clayton 2006: 137-8.)

46 A parallel point applies to moral education generally. (Brighouse and Swift 2014: 151.) See also Trachtenberg 2010.

47 E.g. Caldicott 1986; Royston III 1988.

48 This paper does not address the interesting in-between case of views assigning moral significance to the flourishing of individual non-humans.

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his own considered conception of the good and plan of life.49

vii.

This paper has defended a parental duty to bring children up to be good global climate citizens: to educate children about climate change and climate injustice, involve them in promoting change, and, at least arguably, to lower family emissions beyond what is required for promoting collective change. Along the way, a further duty has been indicated: to leave children capable of adapting to significant lifestyle changes. Clearly, there are broader implications, in particular for parenting in the context of general global injustice. I have focused on climate change because climate duties can be upheld on either positive or negative grounds, and by appeal to only very minimal moral principles. However, I hope this may be the start of a wider debate.

I close with a final question: why are these parents’ duties? Isn’t it up to the state to educate children about climate change and teach them to fulfil their climate justice duties? Very possibly, it should do so. However, parents’ duties still bear discussion, for two reasons. Firstly, whoever bears primary responsibility for securing a child’s opportunity for flourishing – states, parents, all of us - it remains plausible that, if provision is not made elsewhere, parents have a duty to their children to do what they can. Even if the state should educate children about climate change, it is not currently doing so. Secondly, there are some things that currently only parents can do for children. A school may influence it, but a child’s lifestyle is largely determined by her parents. Even when it comes to education, parents could undermine schools’ efforts. (Imagine being taught evolution, then going home to be told it’s all nonsense.)

A further reason was generated by Section IV. This is not only a matter of the child’s future scope to live as a human being and moral agent. It is a matter, too, of maintaining the deep, valuable, intimate parent-child relationship which plays so key a part in ensuring a flourishing childhood and setting the individual up to flourish as an adult. As so often in the parental duty debate,50 this is not simply a matter of certain things being done for the child, but of them being done for him by his parents.

49 This is in line with Brighouse and Swift 2014: 149-74. However, nothing hangs, for the purposes of this paper, on whether it is accepted over more restrictive accounts such as Clayton 2006: 87-123, 2012.

50 E.g. Brighouse and Swift 2014: 70-76; Schrag 2008: 200-06.

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Department of Politics and International Relations University of Edinburgh Chrystal Macmillan Building 15a George Square Edinburgh EH8 9LD elizabeth.cripps@ed.ac.uk

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