2013 Volume 13 Pages 7-19
In the last two decades, a limited number of policy analysts and political philosophers in Japan have explored moral values that provide the goals of a public policy and impose constraints on means to the goals. Despite the development of the study on policy values, the vast majority of policy theorists and practitioners in the country seem to pay scant attention to these values. This article endeavors to remedy this situation by showing that the full-scale evaluation of a policy option requires the examination of a value theory that attempts to justify the option. To illustrate the point, the paper focuses on one of major controversies over what is called climate justice: a debate on the distribution of the rights to emit greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide.
To begin with, this paper sets forth its aim and overviews major issues in the realm of climate justice. There are two primary positions on the distribution of carbon emission rights. The grandfathering view maintains that the initial allocation of these rights should reflect the distribution of carbon emissions at a certain point in the recent past. The equal emission view claims that every person on the globe holds the right to emit the equal per capita amount of carbon dioxide. However, a close examination of value theories that support these views reveals that both of them are ultimately unsuccessful. Based on this negative assessment of the two positions, I try to develop a justification for the third one―the basic needs view―that argues that every person has the right to emit carbon to meet her basic needs. The paper concludes by noting that one should examine a value theory lying behind a policy option when evaluating the option.
