Am I Responsible for Climate Change?—Interpretation of Individual Responsibility in Environmental Ethics
At present,the responsibility attribution in environmental ethics has become the focus of controversy,in which the argument on individual responsibility involves whether the individual can be regarded as a suitable subject of responsibility,whether individuals with high energy consumption should bear more moral responsibility and share more responsibility for emission reduction.The diffi-culty in proving individual responsibility is that the impact of individual behavior on climate change cannot be confirmed and traced because it is difficult to be intuitivelyvisible;therefore,"harmless"view and"ineffectiveness"view try to deny the necessity of individual responsibility from the perspec-tive of causal effectiveness.In order to respond to this difficult question,the defense of individual re-sponsibility should be approached from the retrospective and forward-looking perspectives of moral re-sponsibility.The hazards of climate change are divided into two categories:the established harm and the expected harm.We can analyze the relationship between the established harm,expected harm and individual responsibility in the triggering case and the imperceptible case separately,grasping the in-evitability,necessity and legitimacy of individual responsibility in environmental ethics from a holistic perspective and confirming that individuals have inescapable moral responsibility for environmental protection.
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