Title: The Corporation and the Climate: Ontology, Agency, Responsibility, and Justice
Abstract:
What is the role of business corporations in climate change? How can we conceptualize their moral responsibilities? And how should we understand corporations’ responsibilities against the backdrop of their political power and histories of injustice with their involvement?
This presentation undertakes a journey from ontological conceptions of corporations and discussions about their morally responsible agency to discussions about corporations as political actors and their political responsibilities. It uses insights from these discussions to enquire corporations’ role in one of the greatest issues of justice of our time, climate change.
A key claim of the presentation is that corporations have collectively shared, forward-looking, political responsibilities in climate change to use their positional powers and promote structural change. At the same time, corporations cannot be relied on as agents of justice. They bear moral responsibilities for creating, shaping, and maintaining unjust social structures that impede climate change mitigation or adaptation, such as fossil-fuel dependency. Moreover, through their actions and inactions within such unjust structures over time, corporations may accumulate a "structural debt" in climate change.
The climate crisis today cannot be thought independent of the corporation. This presentation aims to contribute to understanding the role of business corporations in climate change.