This brief Commentary focuses on Professor Farber’s suggestion that corrective justice (CJ) might justify institutions imposing liability on greenhouse gas (GHG) emitters so as to compensate the victims of climate change. He advances other arguments as well, and indeed it is plausible that considerations of overall well-being, or distributive justice, might warrant some sort of liability scheme. I will not, however, address such considerations here.

If there is such a thing as CJ, what does it require? A standard suggestion is this: CJ imposes a duty on the agent who has acted wrongfully, and thereby caused loss to some individual, to repair the loss. There are various aspects to this paradigm. The victim’s loss (arguably) must be more than reduction of well-being; rather, it must be a setback to some protected interest, an aspect of well-being or of personhood that is singled out for concern as a matter of CJ. The action must be causally connected to the loss. And the action must have been “wrongful” or “faulty.”

Corrective Justice and Liability for Global Warming