Cass Sunstein’s Sledgehammer Approach to “Climate Justice”: A Christian Response

It is common to hear that climate justice requires redistributive payments from those countries, like the US, that contribute most to greenhouse gas emissions to those poorer societies that contribute little to the problem but suffer disproportionately from the consequences. Cass Sunstein’s recently released book, Climate Justice, tries to prove this point, while also attempting to link the argument to a fundamentally Christian ethic. 

But the argument has its flaws. For the sake of argument, let us say we agree that greenhouse gas emissions have contributed to the increase in average global temperature over the past century. (This is still debatable.) But the practical effects of that temperature increase are hard to measure. For instance, does the American contribution to greenhouse gas emissions make hurricanes worse? How much worse? Does it cause greater periods of drought? How much greater? 

Sunstein writes, with unfounded certainty, that “Everyone knows that climate change is creating horrors.” But he spends little more than half a page addressing the causation question. He concludes 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 whether a monsoon in Pakistan on a given date was caused by climate change, natural fluctuation of weather patterns, or some combination of the two seriously weakens Sunstein’s argument.

He does acknowledge, though briefly, the difficulty of assigning culpability for climate consequences. He also employs an analogy of a rich and poor individual, and their relationships and duties to one another, to illustrate the rich nation’s obligation to aid the poor. But the analogy is weak, and Sunstein admits that individuals are not nations. 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. But Sunstein suggests that Americans 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, that “[r]ough justice is still justice.”

Sunstein’s redistributivist approach on this issue 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”). But Sunstein fails to substantiate these claims. “Do to others as you would like them to do to you” does not necessarily mean that those with greater resources must always give to those with fewer resources, no questions asked. Interpretation of “love your neighbor as yourself” requires an investigation of the nature of love of self. Sunstein fails to make such an investigation.

Yet the greatest flaw of Sunstein’s argument is his failure to acknowledge the supernatural character 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 command to love thy neighbor were hardly presented as contributions to the brand of social utopianism much later taken up by proponents of the so-called “Social Gospel.” The reason for reciprocity and a spirit of love was not the production of a this-worldly ethic of material equality, but a contribution to the spiritual perfection of souls whose telos is heaven. One makes himself more like Jesus, and therefore more spiritually meritorious, through compassion and love toward others. For Sunstein, this approach to life has material benefits. But for the Christian, acts of love matter for their own sake. 

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 central premises is that “people 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, he urges. This is consistent with the 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 their embodied forms. Those persons who have lived and died are recognized as occupying the same spiritual status, though we now cannot relate to them morally in the same concrete way we can to those still alive. 

But those yet to come are abstractions. Contemplation of the end times is a central metaphysical foundation of Christianity, while materialist redistributionism can hope for nothing beyond the immanent frame. Sunstein’s certainty about what we owe to those who may or may not ever come into existence is beyond the reasonable knowledge of the faithful Christian.

Even if we limit our understanding of the Golden Rule and love of neighbor to material, immanent matters, a Christian respondent to Sunstein might inquire whether the “doing” here on the part of rich countries is as harmful as he suggests. Sunstein is certainly right that any negative environmental effects of consumption might disproportionately affect poor countries. But he has nothing to say about how wealthy countries’ production of climate-harming products can help poorer ones. For example, cutting back on oil and gas use in countries like the US will harm regions that are producers and exporters of petroleum and natural gas (Oil is Africa’s greatest export.) Also, pharmaceutical production is a significant cause of greenhouse gas emissions. And poor countries, especially those in Africa and the Middle East, import food, the production and shipping of which create greenhouse gas emissions. If we cut back on that, those countries will have less food to import, and this will harm their populations. 

Sunstein does not consider these effects—he does not even acknowledge the existence of the positive benefits. He worries that poor countries near the equator will suffer increases in malaria burden because of climate change. But he does not acknowledge that some portion of our greenhouse gas emissions involves work on malaria vaccines that might eradicate the disease. 

Sunstein assures readers that the only morally defensible position is for all countries to consider the whole world, and not just their own needs, in managing activities that might harm the climate. 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 (the “ordo amoris” explained by St. Augustine and, later, St. Thomas Aquinas), is more complicated than Sunstein acknowledges. Pope St. John Paul II was, for example, opposed to “an unhealthy nationalism,” but he writes in Memory and Identity that patriotism, the specific love each of us has for his own country and his countrymen, “leads to a properly ordered social love.” In his letter to the people of Poland, “My beloved Fellow-countrymen,” he argues that “[l]ove of our country. . . springs from the law of the human heart. It is a measure of man’s nobility.”

It is undeniable that the Church calls Christians to aid those who suffer. But real demographic and political realities frame this responsibility. Sunstein provides no answers to reasonable questions about a country’s obligation to curtail its use of sustaining industries, even those that cause harm on a global scale. It is telling that he is so supremely confident in the ability of Americans to endlessly produce material abundance while he is simultaneously so lacking in knowledge about the dominant spiritual foundations underlying that productivity.

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