Mac Willners

Mac Willners

Department of Philosophy, Stockholm University

I’m a PhD student working on moral, political, and applied philosophy, paying particular attention to global warming and instrumental normativity.

Scholar ORCiD PhilPeople

About

Big problems invite radical responses, and I’m interested in when we should accept the invitation.

My go-to case is solar geoengineering, or the proposal to “dim the sun” to cool the planet. While to many a ludicrous proposal, it’s making increasing sense as global warming continues. This raises interesting questions about what it takes for the radical to become reasonable.

My other main interest is instrumental normativity and, especially, political feasibility. Radical responses are often dismissed as utopian, a charge I suspect is too easily launched and comes with too far-reaching consequences—feasibility and other instrumental considerations risk making moral and political theory structurally conservative.

Publications

History abounds with transformative moral heroes—agents devoting their lives to uprooting entrenched unjust structures. Though philosophy has said much about heroes generally, this distinctive class remains undertheorized. This matters because they are among our most celebrated moral exemplars, and much of our sense of moral progress rests on them. Yet they characteristically act against familiar constraints on responsible deliberation, pursuing projects appearing infeasible and inefficacious while foreclosing tractable alternatives that would secure demonstrable goods. We establish this tension and argue the most promising attempts to dissolve it fail. At best, this shows moral theory is structurally conservative, as its standards of responsible deliberation systematically favor mitigation over transformation. At worst, it reveals a deeper instability in moral theory, as it seems to depend for its progress on agents it cannot vindicate.

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The ‘Global Justice Argument’ posits an obligation to research solar geoengineering on the grounds that climate change is unjust and solar geoengineering offers the most effective means to reduce harm befalling climate-disadvantaged people. But even if those claims hold, the argument contains an important gap. As solar geoengineering cannot restore pre-injustice conditions, it at best serves as compensation. Hence, a version of the argument sensitive to rectificatory justice must show climate-disadvantaged groups do not reasonably reject solar geoengineering as compensation. Evidence in that regard is mixed; some groups reasonably reject solar geoengineering, whereas others reluctantly accept it. Consequently, the success of this version of the argument hinges on reconciling these conflicting attitudes. A version of the argument that is only sensitive to distributive concerns largely avoids this issue. But that version faces other difficulties and would, we contend, have limited practical implications.

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Those who have asked who should compensate for harm due to solar geoengineering have been preoccupied with a version of the Polluter Pays Principle according to which compensatory obligations befall deployers of the technology. But there is an alternative (but not mutually exclusive) interpretation. According to it, non-deploying greenhouse gas emitters are liable to compensate for harm due to solar geoengineering since they have contributed to the circumstances rendering it an understandable response to the threat of climate change. Such an Emitter Pays Principle is normatively attractive, especially in cases where deployment is a venial act of self-defense.

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Barry and Cullity argue that when morally assessing a person’s climate actions, we should ask how these actions affect other people’s prospects, understood in terms of the actor’s epistemic probabilities. In this comment we argue, first, that even though Barry and Cullity are right in that we should use a person’s epistemic probabilities when assessing her climate actions, it is not clear that their conclusion follows. The reason is that important questions remain about what should be the object of these epistemic probabilities. Second, we argue that emitting and offsetting is morally analogous to drawing from one ‘harm’ bag and one ‘benefit’ bag even though one has the option of drawing from neither bag.

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Pipeline

One influential argument for solar geoengineering rests on the bleak prospects of sufficient mitigation efforts. The feasibility argument for solar geoengineering is a novel and charitable interpretation of this argument. Still, it is not entirely convincing. Its two (in)feasibility judgments are underspecified and in tension with each other. Moreover, the argument applies feasibility reasoning asymmetrically: it treats mitigation as statically infeasible while relying on a richer, dynamic notion of feasibility to support solar geoengineering. Applying the richer notion consistently suggests that the argument may prescribe not an obligation to invest massively in solar geoengineering, but an obligation to (keep) rely(ing) solely on mitigation.

Many of today’s most pressing moral challenges share the structure of involving large-scale harms marked by overdetermination. Global warming, we argue, exhibits a uniquely challenging case of overdetermination in which several forms of redundancy combine at once. This fact provides a unified diagnosis for why prominent attempts fail to provide individuals with meaningful reasons to reduce their emissions—they all rely on a degree of openness that compound overdetermination forecloses. To meet this challenge, we develop a view which shifts the focus from whether outcomes occur to how agents influence the deontic status of others’ acts. We show that individual emitters worsen the actual or potential causal profiles of others’ emissions in embedding them in a more harmful trajectory, and that this provides individuals with substantial reasons to abstain.

It is not enough for a decision to be democratically satisfactory that it is made through a democratic process. The group making the decision must also be the right group. But what makes a group the right one? That is the democratic boundary problem. We explore it in relation to the governance of cyberspace and social media platforms. We show that the territorial state principle cannot handle cyberspace, nor can treating cyberspace as a sovereign territory of its own. Taking democracy as a normative ideal regarding the fair distribution of power, we defend the all-affected principle, according to which those relevantly affected by a decision should have influence over it in due proportion to how much they are affected, and argue that it favors a decentralized governance of cyberspace, with social media platforms governed by their workers and users within bounds set by democratically enacted laws.

Solar geoengineering is often defended on the grounds that global cooperation on mitigation has failed. Yet, the same literature typically insists that solar geoengineering may itself only be legitimately researched and deployed under near-global governance. This creates a tension: if failures of global cooperation help motivate solar geoengineering in the first place, why make its legitimacy conditional on similarly demanding forms of global cooperation? To date, scholarship has not seriously considered a seemingly straightforward way out of this tension: minilateral solar geoengineering. This is largely because such a governance mode is presumed illegitimate. In response, this paper offers the first sustained normative examination of whether, and under what circumstances, minilateral solar geoengineering could be legitimate. To do so, we develop an account of legitimacy under crisis conditions and show how it can, in principle, vindicate minilateral solar geoengineering. We argue that while minilateralism may offer the strongest available defense of solar geoengineering, the conditions under which it could be legitimate are demanding, contestable, and unlikely to be satisfied by any real-world coalition in the foreseeable future.

Contact

Feel free to contact me with anything from questions and offers to criticisms and demands.

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