Please click on the titles to view the abstract and a link to the publication. 

Some of these publications are Open Access (as indicated). I'm happy to send you a digital copy of the others via email if you can't access them.
​Book
Peeters, W., De Smet, A., Diependaele, S., Sterckx, S. (2015). 
Climate change and individual responsibility. Agency, moral disengagement and the motivational gap. 
Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. ISBN: 978-1-137-46449-1. 
If climate change represents a severe threat to humankind, why then is response to it characterized by inaction at all levels? The authors argue there are two complementary explanations for the lack of motivation. First, our moral judgment system appears to be unable to identify climate change as an important moral problem and there are pervasive doubts about the agency of individuals. This explanation, however, is incomplete: Individual emitters can effectively be held morally responsible for their luxury emissions. Second, doubts about individual agency have become overly emphasized and fail to convincingly exonerate individuals from responsibility. This book extends the second explanation for the motivational gap, namely that the arguments for the lack of individual agency do in fact correspond to mechanisms of moral disengagement. The use of these mechanisms enables consumption elites to maintain their consumptive lifestyles without having to accept moral responsibility for their luxury emissions.
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​Articles
Peeters, W. (2023). 
focussing on people who experience poverty and on poor-led social movements: the methodology of moral philosophy, collective capabilities, and solidarity
In this commentary, I discuss three aspects of Monique Deveaux’s account. First, the method of Grounded Normative Theorizing she adopts to engage directly with the contexts and views of those experiencing poverty fits within a range of proposals to enhance the methodology of moral and political philosophy, and I would call on all philosophers working in this space to further develop these innovative methodologies. Second, Deveaux extends the capabilities approach by focusing on the group-based character of poverty and making the case for building the collective capabilities of poor-led social movements. While I do not substantially disagree with this argument (in practice), I argue that we should be careful to avoid normative collectivism (as a theoretical assumption). Finally, Deveaux discusses political solidarity with people experiencing poverty. I argue that this should be based on esteeming each other’s various contributions in more diverse ways than only in narrow economic terms. Treating people in poverty and poor-led social movements as agents of justice, as Deveaux advocates, is a significant step in this endeavour.
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Peeters, W., Bell, D., Swaffield, J. (2019). 
How new are New Harms really? Climate change, historical reasoning and social change. 
​Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 32 (4): 505-526.
Climate change and other contemporary harms are often depicted as New Harmsbecause they seem to constitute unprecedented challenges. This New Harms Dis-course rests on two important premises, both of which we criticise on empirical grounds. First, we argue that the Premise of changed conditions of human interac-tion—according to which the conditions regarding whom people affect (and how) have changed recently and which emphasises the difference with past conditions of human interaction—risks obfuscating how humanity’s current predicament is merely the transient result of long-term, gradual processes and developments. Sec-ond, we dispute the Premise that New Harms have certain features that render them new and argue that New Harms share characteristics with other (past) harms. On the basis of these premises, the New Harms Discourse concludes that climate change is a unique social challenge that requires radically new moral thinking, but we argue that this Uniqueness Myth distracts attention from the valuable lessons we can draw from humanity’s successes and failures in dealing with past harms. We will illus-trate how action to tackle climate change and other complex, systemic harms can be informed by the interdisciplinary study of historic harms. We will argue that reject-ing the New Harms Discourse is not only empirically justified, it also gives cause for optimism, because it opens up the possibility to draw upon the past to face problems in the present and future.
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Bell, D., Swaffield, J., Peeters, W. (2019).
Climate ethics with an ethnographic sensibility. 
​​Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 32 ​(4): 611-632.
What responsibilities does each of us have to reduce or limit our greenhouse gas emissions? Advocates of individual emissions reductions acknowledge that there are limits to what we can reasonably demand from individuals. Climate ethics has not yet systematically explored those limits. Instead, it has become popular to suggest that such judgements should be ‘context-sensitive’ but this does not tell us what role different contextual factors should play in our moral thinking. The current approach to theory development in climate ethics is not likely to be the most effective way to fill this gap. In existing work, climate ethicists use hypothetical cases to consider what can be reasonably demanded of individuals in particular situations. In contrast, ‘climate ethics with an ethnographic sensibility’ uses qualitative social science methods to collect original data in which real individuals describe their own situations. These real-life cases are more realistic, more detailed and cover a broader range of circumstances than hypothetical cases. Normative analysis of real-life cases can help us to develop a more systematic understanding of the role that different contextual factors should play in determining individual climate responsibilities. It can also help us to avoid the twin dangers of ‘idealization’ and ‘special pleading’.
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Peeters, W., Diependaele, L., Sterckx, S. (2019).
Moral disengagement and the motivational gap in climate change. ​
Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 22 (2): 425-447.
Although climate change jeopardizes the fundamental human rights of current as well as future people, current actions and ambitions to tackle it are inadequate. There are two prominent explanations for this motivational gap in the climate ethics literature. The first maintains that our conventional moral judgement system is not well equipped to identify a complex problem such as climate change as an important moral problem. The second explanation refers to people’s reluctance to change their behaviour and the temptation to shirk responsibility. We argue that both factors are at play in the motivational gap and that they are complemented by crucial moral psychological insights regarding moral disengagement, which enables emitters to dissociate self-condemnation from harmful conduct. In this way, emitters ar able to maintain their profligate, consumptive lifestyle, even though this conflicts with their moral standards with respect to climate change. We provide some illustrations of how strategies of moral disengagement are deployed in climate change and discuss the relationship between the explanations for the motivational gap and moral disengagement. On the basis of this explanatory framework, we submit that there are three pathways to tackle the motivational gap and moral disengagement in climate change: making climate change more salient to emitters and affirming their self-efficacy; reconsidering the self-interested motives that necessitate moral disengagement; and tackling moral disengagement directly. ​
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​De Smet, A., Peeters, W., Sterckx, S. (2016).
The delegated authority model misused as a strategy of disengagement in the case of climate change. 
​Ethics and Global Politics 9. 
The characterisation of anthropogenic climate change as a violation of basic human rights is gaining wide recognition. Many people believe that tackling this problem is exclusively the job of governments and supranational institutions (especially the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change). This argument can be traced back to the delegated authority model, according to which the legitimacy of political institutions depends on their ability to solve problems that are difficult to address at the individual level. Since the institutions created to tackle climate change fail to do so, their legitimacy is under great pressure and can only be saved by considerations of feasibility. We argue that democratically elected representatives are able to claim that a more robust climate policy is unfeasible, but only because the mandate we as citizens grant them is very restrictive. Instead of shifting responsibility for the thoroughly inadequate response to climate change fully to political representatives, we should highlight the failure of the political community as a whole to fulfil its responsibility at the input-side of the delegation of authority. When individual voters fail to fulfil the minimal obligation to at least vote for parties that explicitly advocate robust climate policies, they cannot hide behind the delegated authority argument, but should accept their complicity in the massive violations of basic human rights caused by the failure to successfully tackle climate change.
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Dirix, J., Peeters, W., Sterckx, S. (2016).
Emissions trading ethics. 
​Ethics, Policy and Environment, 19 (1): 60-75.
Although emissions trading is embraced as a means to curb carbon emissions and to incentivize the use of renewable energy, it is also heavily contested on ethical grounds. We will assess the main fundamental objections and possible counterarguments. Although we sympathize with some of these arguments, we argue that they are unpersuasive when an emissions trading system is well designed: emissions should be accounted ‘upstream,’ on the production rather than the consumer level. Moreover, allowances should be auctioned, and regulatory measures (such as an escalating tax on additional allowances) could instigate the right kind of behavior towards the environment.
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Dirix, J., Peeters, W., Sterckx, S. (2016).
​Is the Clean Development Mechanism delivering benefits to the poorest communities in the developing world? A critical evaluation and proposals for reforms. 
Environment, Development and Sustainability, 18: 839-855.
This paper explores whether the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), a flexibility mechanism under the Kyoto Protocol, has contributed to poverty alleviation in countries that host CDM projects. We argue that the CDM should deliver pro-poor benefits to the communities in which projects are established, since poverty alleviation is integral to sustainable development, which is one of the main purposes of the CDM. After briefly discussing the background of the CDM, we discuss assessment difficulties to which research is prone when evaluating CDM projects for alleged sustainable development contributions. Section 4 brings together and analyses available empirical research on the pro-poor benefits the CDM purportedly delivers to host country communities, concluding that the CDM has failed to deliver poverty alleviation. Therefore, without attempting to be exhaustive, we suggest policy reforms that aim to redirect the CDM to those most in need of assistance. 
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​Peeters, W., Dirix, J., Sterckx, S. (2015).
Towards an integration of the ecological space paradigm and the capabilities approach. 
​Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 28 (3): 479-496.
In order to develop a model of equitable and sustainable distribution, this paper advocates integrating the ecological space paradigm and the capabilities approach. As the currency of distribution, this account proposes a hybrid of capabilities and ecological space. Although the goal of distributive justice should be to secure and promote people’s capabilities now and in the future, doing so requires acknowledging that these capabilities are dependent on the biophysical preconditions as well as inculcating the ethos of restraint. Both issues have been highlighted from the perspective of the ecological space paradigm. Concerning the scope of distributive justice, the integration can combine the advantages of the ecological space paradigm regarding the allocation of the responsibilities involved in environmental sustainability with the strength of the capabilities approach regarding people’s entitlements. The pattern of distribution starts from a capability threshold. In order to achieve this threshold, ecological space should be provided sufficiently, and the remaining ecological space budget could then be distributed according to the equal per capita principle. 
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Peeters, W., Dirix, J., Sterckx, S. (2015).
The capabilities approach and environmental sustainability: The case for functioning constraints. 
​Environmental Values, 24 (3): 367-389.
The capabilities approach of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum has become an influential viewpoint for addressing issues of social justice and human development. It has not yet, however, given adequate theoretical consideration to the requirements of environmental sustainability. Sen has focussed on the instrumental importance of human development for achieving sustainability, but has failed to consider the limits of this account, especially with respect to consumption-reduction. Nussbaum has criticised constraining material consumption for its paternalistic prescription of one particular conception of the good life, without considering it as an imperative of justice. We discuss two possible extensions of the capabilities approach. First, the concept of capability ceilings contains several attractive elements, but it also suffers from some shortcomings. Therefore, second, we advocate constraining people’s combinations of functionings in accordance with a personal budget which consists of a fair share of environmental resources.
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​Dirix, J., Peeters, W., Sterckx, S. (2015).
Is the EU ETS a just climate policy? 
​New Political Economy, 20 (5): 702-724.
The European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) is in dire straits. Prone to design problems and suffering from the effects of the economic crises the scheme is criticised for its poor achievements. In this paper we will analyse some of the features of this situation from an ethical perspective. The major part is dedicated to the complications within each phase of the EU ETS and to the recent developments it has undergone. We will briefly discuss the remedies suggested by prominent commentators. Furthermore, any policy tool to tackle climate change should be evaluated in view of the profound equity issues that are inherent to the climate problem. We will evaluate the EU ETS according to two justice-based criteria, related to effectiveness and the distribution of the duties involved in climate change, respectively. We will conclude that the EU ETS, in its current form, clearly lacks fairness on both criteria. However, the biggest problem is the unwillingness of EU leaders to mend, what could be, a commendable climate policy tool. To that extent, we argue, those leaders are acting unjustly. 

​Peeters, W., Dirix, J., Sterckx, S. (2013).
Putting sustainability into sustainable human development. 
​Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, 14 (1): 58-76.
Abating the threat climate change poses to the lives of future people clearly challenges our development models. The 2011 Human Development Report rightly focuses on the integral links between sustainability and equity. However, the human development and capabilities approach emphasizes the expansion of people’s capabilities simpliciter, which is questionable in view of environmental sustainability. We argue that capabilities should be defined as triadic relations between an agent, constraints and possible functionings. This triadic syntax particularly applies to climate change: since people’s lives and capabilities are dependent on the environment, sustainable human development should also include constraining human activities in order to prevent losses in future people’s well-being due to the adverse effects of exacerbated climate change. On this basis, we will advocate that the goals of sustainable human development should be informed by a framework that consists of enhancing capabilities up to a threshold level, as well as constraining the functionings beyond this threshold in terms of their greenhouse gas emissions. 
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​Dirix, J., Peeters, W., Eyckmans, J., Jones, P., Sterckx, S. (2013).
Strengthening bottom-up and top-down climate governance. 
​Climate Policy, 13 (3): 363-383. 
Although the UN and EU focus their climate policies on the prevention of a 2 8C global mean temperature rise, it has been estimated that a rise of at least 4 8C is more likely. Given the political climate of inaction, there is a need to instigate a bottom-up approach so as to build domestic support for future climate treaties, empower citizens, and motivate leaders to take action. A review is provided of the predominant top-down cap-and-trade policies in place – the Kyoto Protocol and EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) – with a focus on the grandfathering of emissions entitlements and the possibility of offsetting emissions. These policies are evaluated according to two criteria of justice and it is concluded that they fail to satisfy them. Some suggestions as to how the EU ETS can be improved so as to enable robust climate action are also offered. 
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Book chapters and contributions to conference proceedings
Peeters, W. (2017).
​A sufficientarian perspective on human development goals.
In I. Muñoz, M. Blondet, G. Gamio (eds). Ética, agencia y desarollo humano. V Conferencia de la Asociación Latinoamericana y del Caribe para el Desarrollo Humano y el Enfoque de Capacidades. 
​Lima: Fondo Editorial Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. ​
​[not peer-reviewed]
Each account of justice should substantiate the 'pattern' of distribution; the principles according to which distribution should take place. The role of such principle is to determine when justice obtains, to guide policy decisions, and to determine development goals. In this paper, we will give a possible philosophical underpinning of human development goals by substantiating a 'sufficientarian' pattern of distribution. We will discuss Martha Nussbaum's sufficientarian version of the capabilities approach. Because we find this account wanting, we will develop a multilevel sufficientarian model of justice. On this basis, we will make some suggestions with respect to the practical distribution of social and material conditions of justice, and how this relates to analysing the goals of human development.
Peeters, W., De Smet, A., Sterckx, S. (2014).
​Individual agency and responsibility in mitigating climate change.
In McBain, D. (ed.). Power, justice and citizenship: The relationships of power (3-17).
​Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press. ​
Although an appeal to human moral agency can motivate us to shoulder responsibility for our normative conduct, its phenomenological features have also been invoked to support certain restrictions on individual responsibility imposed by common-sense morality. Indeed, global dynamics such as climate change generate doubts about our practice of regarding the individual as the locus of responsibility, since, as noted by Samuel Scheffler, we tend to experience acts as having primacy over omissions, near effects as having primacy over remote effects, and individual effects as having primacy over group effects. At first sight, these phenomenological features of agency might appear to justify absolving the individual of her responsibility, but we will argue that in fact they can neither support nor justify a restrictive conception of individual responsibility. Individualsare agents with causal powers on the global level and therefore they can properly be held responsible for the harm their actions cause – however mediated the causal connection may be. In contrast to Scheffler, we will argue that the doubts about individual responsibility on the global level are generated by the context that gives rise to the so-called common-sense morality in which the vested interests of those who have a great deal to gain from a restrictive conception of responsibility and a great deal to lose from coming to see the global context as morally salient, are dominant. This context is shaped by a particular interpretation of the liberal political assumptions, which emphasises individual freedom and holds that the role of social and political institutions is to discharge as many responsibilities for citizens as possible.
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This was a first and very brief overview of the research elaborated in:
  • Peeters, W., Diependaele, L., Sterckx, S. (2019). Moral disengagement and the motivational gap in climate change. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 22 (2): 425-447.
  • Peeters, W., De Smet, A., Diependaele, L., Sterckx, S. (2015). Climate change and individual responsibility: Agency, moral disengagement and the motivational gap. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
De Smet, A., Peeters, W., Sterckx, S. (2014).
​A non-reductionist defence of global citizenship.
In McBain, D. (ed.). Power, justice and citizenship: The relationships of power (123-133).
Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press. ​
According to Samuel Scheffler, a conflict exists between distributive justice and individual responsibility. At the heart of this debate lies the common-sense moral concept of ‘special responsibilities,’ i.e. responsibilities we only have to people with whom we have significant personal ties. For example, membership of the same community is often said to entail this kind of responsibility. However, this conception of individual responsibility is under attack from two different directions. On the one hand, according to the voluntarist objection, special responsibilities may constitute significant burdens for their bearers and hence, cannot be imposed on people without their consent or voluntary choice. The distributive objection on the other hand, claims that the common-sense moral conception of responsibility is overly limited in scope, and that it cannot be a sufficient guide for moral conduct, given the challenges we are facing in a globalised world (such as climate change, persistent poverty and rapid resource depletion). We will take the non-reductionist claim as the point of departure for our analysis. According to this claim, genuine special responsibilities are based upon relationships that one has reason to value, irrespective of whether or not these relationships are actually valued. Although non-reductionists defend special responsibilities against the voluntarist objection on this basis, we will argue that a sound conception of the reasons to value certain relationships can widen rather than restrict the scope of individual responsibility, thus meeting the distributive challenge as well. More specifically, we will examine which conditions might provide sufficient reasons to value relationships. We will conclude that such an account can widen the scope of special responsibilities to include the whole of mankind and shall defend a conception of global citizenship and cosmopolitanism.
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Peeters, W., Dirix, J., Sterckx, S. (2014).
​Putting sustainability into sustainable human development.
In O. Lessmann, F. Rauschmayer (eds). The capability approach and sustainability (57-75).
New York: Routledge. ISBN: 978-0-415-71253-8. 
​[Reprinted from Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, 14 (1): 58-76]. ​
Abating the threat climate change poses to the lives of future people clearly challenges our development models. The 2011 Human Development Report rightly focuses on the integral links between sustainability and equity. However, the human development and capabilities approach emphasizes the expansion of people’s capabilities simpliciter, which is questionable in view of environmental sustainability. We argue that capabilities should be defined as triadic relations between an agent, constraints and possible functionings. This triadic syntax particularly applies to climate change: since people’s lives and capabilities are dependent on the environment, sustainable human development should also include constraining human activities in order to prevent losses in future people’s well-being due to the adverse effects of exacerbated climate change. On this basis, we will advocate that the goals of sustainable human development should be informed by a framework that consists of enhancing capabilities up to a threshold level, as well as constraining the functionings beyond this threshold in terms of their greenhouse gas emissions. 
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Dirix, J., Peeters, W., Sterckx, S. (2014).
Diversified Climate Action: The top-down failure and the rise of emissions trading.
​In G. Collste, L. Reuter (eds). Proceedings from the 50thSocietas Ethica Annual Conference 2013. Climate change, sustainability, and an ethics of an open future (63-78).
​Linköping: Linköping University Press. ​
​This paper focuses on the diversified climate action the international community is currently witnessing. Besides examining possible reasons for the failure of the top-down approach to effectively halt rising emission levels, the development of bottom-up initiatives is discussed. In addition, this paper evaluates the European Union’s emissions trading system (EU ETS) according to two criteria of justice, with a special focus on two characteristics of the EU ETS: grandfathering and offsetting. The final section of this paper addresses the rise of emissions trading systems and considers the claims made by prominent commentators who believe emissions trading to be inherently unethical. The paper concludes, first, that whether emissions trading is morally reprehensible depends on its design and, second, that the EU ETS fails to respect justice-based criteria and points to the unwillingness of EU leaders to mend a flawed climate policy tool.
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Peeters, W., Dirix, J., Sterckx, S. (2012).
Towards an ecological space paradigm: Fair and sustainable distribution of environmental resources.
In Potthast, T., Meisch, S. (eds). Climate change and sustainable development: Ethical perspectives on land use and food production (55-60).
​Wageningen: Wageningen Academic Publishers. ​
Humanity's current consumption patterns threaten the lives of current as well as future people. This provides a strong moral imperative to take the material constraints of the environment as the point of departure for an account of sustainable distributive justice. This ecological space paradigm should focus on a multidimensional, non-aggregative conception of carrying capacity. However, because resources are merely instrumental in pursuing various ends, we suggest combining capabilities and ecological space as the currency of distributive justice. As regards scope, this integrative account has the major advantage of combining the strength of the capabilities approach regarding global justice with the focus of the ecological space paradigm on intertemporal justice. The pattern of distribution should then take the form of distributing material resources so as to enable everyone to reach the capability threshold, while the leftover ecological space should be distributed on an equal per capita basis.

The content of this paper is developed further in Peeters, W., Dirix, J., Sterckx, S. (2014). Towards an integration of the ecological space paradigm and the capabilities approach. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 28 (3): 479-496.
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Dirix, J., Peeters, W., Sterckx, S. (2012).
Equal per capita entitlements to greenhouse gas emissions: A justice-based critique.
In Potthast, T., Meisch, S. (eds). Climate change and sustainable development: Ethical perspectives on land use and food production (121-127).
Wageningen: Wageningen Academic Publishers. ​
Climate Change has made us aware of the finite absorptive capacity of the atmosphere. Moreover, a fifth of the emissions that overstep our earth's boundaries result from meat and dairy consumption, which is estimated to double by 2050. In this paper we question whether an equal per capita (EPC) allocation of emission entitlements, and Contraction and Convergence (C&C) approach that is derived from the EPC model, meets the demands of distributive and participatory justice. We first explain that the EPC ignores historical responsibility for the problem and prefers the use of a benchmark emissions year on the basis of which emissions are measured and entitlements are distributed. We argue that the use of a benchmark favours the largest culprits and harms the development of non-industrialized nations. Nevertheless, whilst advocating the inclusion of historical responsibility, we refrain from promoting negative allocations, for this would violate premises of egalitarian moral theory. Furthermore, the EPC model ignores existing geographical and interpersonal differences that seem to require a differentiated allocation, for it disregards the moral difference between subsistence and luxury emissions. It thus centres on the means instead of the ends of energy use. Moreover, we observe that the equal allocation proposal isolates goods, and argue that theories of justice relate to 'packages of goods', rather than to separate goods. Finally, we question whether the EPC scheme meets the requirements of participatory justice. The proponents of an equal allocation assume the state to be the aggregate rights bearer, yet in our view such an assumption implies certain potentially harmful generalisations. With regard to the responsibility-based efforts that nations should undertake, we propose to differentiate between groups within nations so as to enhance the participatory justice of bearing responsibility for the problem.