The problem of past emissions and intergenerational debts

The problem of past emissions – how to share fairly the costs of climate-changing emissions caused by polluters who are no longer in existence – presents an increasingly pressing challenge to scholars and policy-makers. Since standard contribution-based principles are inapplicable when it comes to past emissions, theorists have instead proposed various non-contribution-based historical principles. This paper develops such a principle – the Inherited Debt Principle – which seeks to account for the intuition that historical injustice matters to current duties in a way that does not appeal to the counterfactual benefits derived from that injustice. This principle, it is argued, offers a surprisingly plausible solution to the problem of past emissions.