Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by All Things Rhapsodical on May 01, 2025. With edits to match MTC’s style guidelines, it is cross-posted here with permission.
It is common these days to hear that climate justice requires redistributive payments from those societies, such as the U.S., that contribute most to greenhouse gas emissions to those poorer societies that contribute little to the problem but suffer in a disproportionate way from the consequences.
Climate Justice is a noteworthy such effort, not only because of the academic status of its author, but also because of the explicit effort it makes to link the argument to a fundamentally Christian ethic.
There is a tremendously complicated causal argument that must be definitively cleared up if a reasonable person is to seriously consider the argument made in this book. Let us say we agree that greenhouse gas emissions have made a substantial contribution to the increase in average global temperature over the past century or so. (The specifics of the quantitative level of that contribution are still under debate.) What this tells us about the actual causal contribution of that increase to particular weather events is immensely difficult and perhaps altogether impossible to know. Does the American contribution to greenhouse gas emissions make hurricanes worse? How much worse? Does it cause greater periods of drought? How much greater? How do we know this with any precision at all?
Sunstein’s certainty about the situation is stunning. “Everyone knows that climate change is creating horrors,” he declares. He spends a little more than half a page addressing the causation problem. He concludes this tiny interlude by claiming that while causation problems “weaken…corrective justice claims[,]” they “are not fatal to [them].” But the fact that we have no way of proving a monsoon in Pakistan on a given date was caused by climate change rather than simply a natural fluctuation of weather patterns, or some complicated combination of the two, certainly “weakens” Sunstein’s central premises very substantially indeed.
He acknowledges, too, although again fleetingly briefly, the difficulty of attributing culpability for these climate consequences. He uses an individual analogy to get at the rich nation/poor nation dynamic, substituting individuals for states. But he admits that individuals are not nations, and the differences affect the effectiveness of the analogy. It is not clear that it is morally justified to require poor people in rich nations to contribute to the redistributionist climate change plan Sunstein advocates, or to permit rich people in poor countries to benefit from it. Perhaps, he admits, individual Americans cannot be held responsible for their outsized use of resources here. But he suggests that we are guilty of tolerating political administrations that have not done enough on climate change. Only a few pages in the book are dedicated to the causation and culpability problems before Sunstein concludes unconvincingly, “Rough justice is still justice.”
His redistributivist approach on this issue—in which nationalism as a standpoint for political responsibility is rejected and each rich state is to be held responsible for the global effects of its actions—is, he assures us, consistent with the Golden Rule of “Jesus of Nazareth,” as well as with the second of the two great commandments given in the Gospels—“Love your neighbor as yourself.” There is no substantive exploration of either of these doctrines in Sunstein’s book. Understanding how closely his view aligns with the ethic of these two rules as they are interpreted by the followers of that same Jesus of Nazareth requires an investigation of the interpretation of those rules. “Do to others as you would like them to do to you” does not necessarily imply an iron-clad rule of those with greater resources giving to those with fewer resources without any qualifying expectation. Interpretation of “love your neighbor as yourself” requires an investigation of the nature of love of self.
The history of Christian thought about these principles has frequently engaged with such qualifying material. The consensus in Christian ethics is that it is not in the power of earthly actors to alleviate all suffering, and that suffering offers opportunity for spiritual growth that is difficult or impossible to achieve otherwise. A Christian can be completely consistent with the Golden Rule and the imperative to love the neighbor and emphasize that these rules are not to do with a simple material handout or redistribution but rather with compassion accompanied by careful recognition of the agency and moral responsibility I have for transcending my own conditions of suffering through faith. Nothing implicit in the Golden Rule or love of the neighbor endorses global socialism or communism.
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The central element that is omitted from the logic of these two rules by materialist interpreters, such as Sunstein, is the supernatural nature of the worldview driving it. Jesus instructed followers to orient themselves not simply to moral results in this world, but especially to the pursuit of moral rewards in the next. The Golden Rule and the injunction to love the neighbor were hardly presented as contributions to the kind of social utopianism much later taken up, e.g., in the early 20th century by proponents of the Social Gospel. The reason for reciprocity and a spirit of love was not the production of a this-worldly ethic of material equality, but as a contribution to the spiritual perfection of souls whose endpoint is the world to come. You make yourself more like Jesus, and therefore more spiritually meritorious, through compassion and love shown toward the other. It is not the material effect that is central element of the act, as Sunstein would have it. This is the core distortion behind efforts like Sunstein’s to try to read core Christian principles into their own political projects.
Another point of disconnect is evident in Sunstein’s confident theorizing about the comparative value of human life now and in a hypothesized future. One of his book’s central premises is that “[p]eople who are alive now do not deserve greater attention and concern than people who will be born twenty years hence, or forty years hence, or a hundred years hence.” “Intergenerational neutrality” is the principle all nations should follow. This is perfectly consistent with the airily abstract humanism of much of the political left. Human lives are objects of value in a theoretical sense, whether actually existing or only possible or probable at some future point. But Christianity rejects abstraction on this issue. It is real human souls that are sacred, and we encounter them in this world only in the embodied forms of our actually existing fellows. Those persons who have lived and died are recognized as occupying the same spiritual status, though we now cannot relate with them morally in the same concrete way we can with those still alive.
But those yet to come are abstractions. We cannot even know that human beings to be born in fifty or a hundred or a thousand years will in fact at some point exist. God alone knows such things. Myriad events could take place between now and those future times to prevent those occurrences. There might be global thermonuclear war, or a sizable meteor that strikes the planet and causes a mass extinction, or a new global pandemic that exterminates half the human race. If it seems morbid to reflect on such small but non-zero probabilities of catastrophe, it is perhaps a good time to recall that the expectation of the end of this world is a central metaphysical foundation of Christianity, while materialist redistributionism can hope for nothing beyond this mortal frame. The kind of certainty Sunstein evinces in his highly specific claims about what we owe to those who may or may not ever come into existence must be seen as beyond the reasonable knowledge of the faithful Christian.
Even if we limit ourselves to a consideration of how the Golden Rule and Neighbor Love might be understood in application to this-worldly matters, a Christian respondent to Sunstein might inquire as to whether the “doing” here on the part of rich countries is as uniformly harmful as he suggests. Sunstein is certainly right that any negative environmental effects of this consumption—given, as already indicated, the difficult problem of proving the causal relationship between the consumption and those effects—are likely to be spread around the world and therefore to affect poor countries in a way disproportionate to their own contribution to the problem. But he has nothing to say about the benefits produced for poor countries by the activity in the rich countries that is contributing to climate change. Cutting back on oil and gas use in countries like the US will harm regions and countries that are big producers and exporters of petroleum and natural gas. (Oil is Africa’s single most important export.) It is also the case that pharmaceutical production is a significant cause of greenhouse gas. If the rich countries that produce those pharmaceuticals decrease that production as part of a climate change redistribution, there will be fewer of those pharmaceuticals to be passed along to poor countries. Poor countries, especially in Africa and the Middle East, import a huge amount of food, and the production and shipping of that food creates greenhouse gas emissions. If we cut back on that, those countries will have less food to import, and this will produce harm to their populations.
Calculating the balance of these positive aspects for poor countries of rich countries’ contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and the negative results accruing to them through climate change would require complex and careful methodologies. It is not just that Sunstein does not give us those calculations—he does not even acknowledge the existence of the positive benefits. It is a crushing, even decisive, indictment of his argument. He worries that poor countries near the equator will suffer increases in malaria burden because of climate change. But he apparently does not know that some portion of our greenhouse gas emissions involves work on malaria vaccines that promise to end the disease.
Sunstein assures his readers that the only morally defensible position is for all countries to reason globally and not in terms of their own priorities and needs. The position of Christianity on love of and preference for one’s own country and, more generally, the moral correctness of attending more carefully to those closer in relation than to those more distant, is more complicated than Sunstein’s effort to mobilize the Golden Rule in favor of his argument acknowledges. (See the ordo amoris first presented by Augustine and developed by Aquinas, which was recently tellingly invoked by our Vice-President). Pope John Paul II was, for example, opposed to “an unhealthy nationalism,” but he argued in Memory and Identity that patriotism, the specific love each of us has for his own country and his own countrymen, “leads to a properly ordered social love.” In “My Beloved Countrymen,” he argued that “[l]ove of our motherland…is the right of the human heart. It is the measure of human nobility.”
There are complicated issues in Christianity at issue here. It is undeniable that the faith calls Christians to a moral responsibility to aid those who suffer in the world, regardless of their inclusion or lack thereof in their own national communities. But no reasoned Christian view of this obligation could fail completely to consider real demographic and political realities that frame this responsibility. The number of the needy is so great, and their material need so large, that aiding them in costly material ways, in this case to cope with the potential costs of climate change, could potentially result in the implosion of the economy of the giving country. By what logic are the members of that country obliged to wreck their own polities and economies, or even to significantly increase the likelihood of those outcomes in an uncertain economic environment? Sunstein has no convincing answer to reasonable doubts that American efforts to adhere to this self-sacrificing ethic will necessarily trigger like responses from other high producers of greenhouse emissions (notably, China and India), yet this does not dissuade him from insisting that this is the only properly moral response.
American material prosperity is taken as a natural given in Sunstein’s analysis. This is a highly unrealistic analysis of the risks of the contemporary global economic and political situation. It is telling that he is this confident in the ability of Americans to endlessly produce material abundance while he is so unknowledgeable about the dominant spiritual foundations underlying that productivity.
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Image: “Boston Students March Against Climate Denier for EPA Transition” by Peter Bowden on Flickr
This “What Would Jesus Do” stuff is nothing more than a new twist on “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Civ Has Gotta Go…”
Let’s take plastic in the ocean — it’s arriving via rivers mostly in Asia, with some also in East Africa and the Caribbean — and yet the west gets blamed for this. Wake me up when the plastic is coming down the Columbia, Connecticut, Mississippi and Penobscot Rivers.
It was first Global Cooling, and then Global Warming, and now just Global Climate Change — and the only thing in common is that western civilization is responsible.