States, firms, and individuals can “offset” their greenhouse gas emissions by buying offset certificates, paying for the assurance that a quantified number of emissions will be avoided on their behalf in a suitable emission mitigation project. True offsetting can only be achieved when the mitigation project conducted is “additional”. Apart from this causal additionality, however, there is a second issue that has attracted much less attention: to endorse the practice of offsetting from a normative perspective, I will argue that we should not only demand that the offsetting project is causally additional, we should also demand that it is morally additional. Moral additionality requires that there is no other relevant agent who is under a moral obligation to perform the project. Moral additionality is violated if offsetting projects are offered by agents who are themselves both able and morally required to bring about emission reductions, but instead choose to sell these emission reductions as carbon offsets to others. The issue of moral additionality can be applied more generally to non-ideal partial compliance settings whenever a principal instructs an agent to perform morally required (but not agent-relative) obligations on his behalf.

Kai Spierkermann is Associate Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests span normative and positive questions in moral theory and political philosophy, game theory and its philosophical applications, social epistemology and environmental change.

Lunch will be provided at the seminar after the Q&A session.