In recent years, political theorists and philosophers have begun to question the relevance and primacy of the utopian premises of ideal theory—working assumptions that existing social and political institutions as well as individual actions are guided by principles of justice, and that current environmental and socioeconomic conditions are favorable to establishing or maintaining a fully just society. Whether or not normative judgments about, or prescriptions for, the real world can be meaningfully derived from analyses that assume idealized conditions that rarely, if ever, hold in that world has become a methodological controversy among scholars. Some advocates of nonideal theory merely emphasize the need to account for the context of nonideal circumstances in deriving or applying justice principles, while others use the distinction to reject analytic approaches to political theory altogether.

Referencing the nonideal circumstances against which many normative issues related to climate change arise, in which agents fail to comply with just terms of cooperation in mitigating climate change or to assist those adversely affected by its impacts, and where ecological scarcity threatens to become more than moderate, Clare Heyward and Dominic Roser aim to “merge” the “growing interest in climate justice and the growing calls for non-ideal theory” (p. 9). They take an “ecumenical” (p. 6) approach to the ideal versus nonideal theory distinction, referencing the debate within the introduction but rarely engaging it directly in substantive chapters. The majority of contributors rely upon ideal theory premises and methods, but all focus upon the gap between the ideals of justice and the decidedly nonideal circumstances associated with climate change. All fourteen original chapters in one way or another grapple with the social, political, and environmental conditions under which humans cause and are increasingly affected by climate change, utilizing justice ideals or principles to constructively engage with these circumstances.

None of the contributors takes the hard line pursued by some critics in declaring ideal theory “normatively useless” in distinguishing justice from injustice, even if several seek alternative modes of theorizing that avoid abstraction away from existing injustice. Darrel Moellendorf’s chapter, for example, seeks normativity in the expressed commitments of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, rather than abstract principles that might be invoked to justify them. In so doing, he responds to the skepticism expressed by critics of ideal theory that analytic theorizing cannot provide an adequate normative foundation for justice in a context like climate change, despite his embrace of such approaches elsewhere. One might view his chapter, along with those included in Parts II and III (entitled “Less Injustice” and “Dealing with Controversy”) of this well-organized volume, as developing a “public philosophy” that aims to distill the often obscure and abstract theoretical methods of scholars into policy-relevant diagnoses and prescriptions that are accessible to nonspecialists without being unfaithful to their philosophical bases.

One area in which nonideal theorizing seems particularly compelling concerns personal duties to reduce individual contributions toward climate change, or personal carbon emissions. In the field of climate ethics, philosophers commonly rely upon the ideal theory premise of full compliance, asking what each is obligated to do to mitigate climate change on the assumption that all will do as they ought. A common approach starts with an imperative like refraining from harm, deriving from this the duty to become carbon neutral so that one does not contribute at all toward climate change, or a goal like preventing more than 2° Celsius of warming. This requires calculating individual or societal carbon budgets on the basis of an equitable assignment of remedial burdens, whereby full compliance would be sufficient to realize the temperature objective. Here, politics, policies, and states as well as other institutions play at most a peripheral role; they are merely charged with implementing norms that are derived without any acknowledgment of their existence.

By neglecting politics and institutions, and thus what distinguishes political theory from purely analytic approaches to ethics or political philosophy, however, they may also be accused of neglecting considerations relevant to individual ethical obligation. Or so at least Simon Caney claims in his contribution, which starts with the fact that humans have not fulfilled their obligations to avoid contributing to climate change, giving rise to the further question of what (if anything) others must do to compensate for this failure. Under ideal theory, persons would be obligated to contribute the same share of mitigation burdens regardless of whether or not others also did, but Caney doubts that this exhausts the plausible ethical possibilities. Insofar as the 2° target defines the global temperature goal that justifies and informs mitigation duties, he suggests, perhaps some ought to be assigned greater burdens when others fail to do as much as they ought. Conversely, perhaps the widespread failure to comply with justly allocated mitigation burdens lowers, rather than raises, the required contributions of those participating in a cooperative scheme to mitigate climate change, given the unfair competitive disadvantages they face as a result. While Caney ultimately dodges the question of whether only partial compliance requires the reallocation of burdens, he makes a compelling case for theorizing from nonideal circumstances rather than setting aside such inconvenient facts as irrelevant to normative analysis.

The noncompliance of others might give rise to new or additional duties of justice, as well as affecting existing ones. As Aaron Maltais argues in his chapter, it might be that justice in the sharing of mitigation burdens requires as a precondition that obstacles to full compliance be identified and eliminated, generating a subsidiary duty to create the conditions under which more primary duties are likely to be fulfilled. Similarly, as Holly Lawford-Smith argues, individual obligations might be structured by state actions, with the latter also dependent upon the former for support, in which case justice requires institutional coordination of individual actions in order to overcome collective-action incentives and provide assurances of compliance. Likewise, Dominic Roser proposes a kind of second-order obligation to make possible the compliance with first-order justice principles, addressing issues of limits on personal motivation to act on a problem of global scope when it makes no discernable difference. All three take nonideal circumstances, institutions, actions, and motives as relevant to theorizing about climate justice, infusing politics into questions that have elsewhere too often been treated by scholars as if it were irrelevant.

Collectively, the chapters provide an effective treatment of normative issues in climate politics and policy, with a uniformly strong set of contributions that are coherently organized and well informed by the realities of climate politics as well as the methods of and debates within political theory and applied ethics, and so the book should be of interest and use to scholars both of justice and of environmental politics and governance. While the separate chapters only occasionally address one another directly, they speak to common themes and could thus prove suitable for use in graduate-level teaching, as well as provide a primer on current questions in and approaches to the scholarly field of climate justice, with the variety of normative theories and methods that Climate Justice in a Non-Ideal World seeks to apply to this important contemporary environmental problem.