Professor Gunnar Björnsson

Date: Thursday 24 October 2013, 6.15pm

Venue: Appleton Tower, 11 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9LE

Tickets are free but booking is essential.

Lecture abstract

Many of the major problems facing the world today, such as climate change and global injustice, are extraordinarily complex. They are caused or sustained not by the actions of some one identifiable human being, but by the actions of multiple agents, including not only human beings, but also corporations, nations, and organizations. The possible solutions seem no less complex, requiring actions from countless agents at the individual, corporate, national, and international levels. Since no individual agent seems to have much control over the problem, it is hard to see how individual agents can be said to be responsible for, or have an obligation to solve it.

In this talk, I argue that to understand what problems we are responsible for and what obligations we have in such complex cases, we need to understand the nature of responsibility and obligations more generally. Rightly understood, responsibility and obligations can fall not only on individual agents, but also on groups of agents, such as well-off people in affluent societies. Even if cannot be my obligation to prevent catastrophic climate change, it might be ours.