September, 5th: Eric Brandstedt (Lund University): The Argument from Legitimate Expectations and a liberal conservative theory of social change
Lukas Meyer has together with co-authors in several articles argued that some of the expectations a transition to a net-zero world may frustrate ground justified claims to support, compensation or favourable treatment (Meyer and Sanklecha 2011, 2014; Meyer and Truccone-Borgogno 2022; Meyer and Truccone 2025; see also Lazou 2023, 2024a, 2024b; Hopster 2025). This paper argues that this approach to transitional justice is extended beyond its reach. Frustrated expectations are relevant to consider only to the extent that they either reveal illegitimate use of political power or how too abrupt or otherwise ill-designed social change risks undermining valuable and meaningful practices and projects. The first concern has a liberal leaning and the second a conservative one. These two grounds explain when and why frustrated expectations are normatively problematic and make Meyer et al’s theory of legitimate expectations superfluous. The liberal-conservative theory of social change is furthermore better equipped to address the problem of being either too exclusive (excluding too many or all claims to transitional support) or too inclusive (opening for a flood of demands for transitional support that in practice would make major social change, such as combatting climate change, close to impossible). Finally, the liberal-conservative theory provides a better view of the broad palette of remedies necessary to further a just transition, beyond the narrow focus on just compensation often assumed in discussions of legitimate expectations.
October, 10: Kathleen Wallace (Hofstra University): A Duty to Live Sustainably in the Face of Inefficacy
Living sustainably is a collective practice since doing so usually depends on the cumulative, sometimes coordinated, actions and behaviors of many. If others do not engage in such efforts, living sustainably will be difficult to achieve at the individual level and will (usually) be inefficacious in affecting collective practices and their impacts. It is some times that argued collective entities (governments, corporations, etc.) ought to address such issues and that individuals have no moral duties to do so. However, there are both consequentialist and nonconsequentialist moral reasons for considering individuals as having duties to not live unsustainably (which would include duties to cooperate with others), even if their actions are inefficacious, that is, do not impact collective practices and their impacts on a broad scale. In this paper, I consider how Kantian notions might be interpreted to elaborate nonconsequentialist reasoning in support of having such duties.
November, 7th: Anna Wienhues (KU Leuven): A Systems-Thinking Approach to Green Political Philosophy
Drawing on the discussion so far, this sub-chapter argues for a particular understanding of sustainability for the purposes of – non-anthropocentric – political thought. For that aim it provides an argument about how systems thinking found in other disciplines such as Earth system science needs to be integrated into political philosophy to address the challenges of environmental thought beyond the Holocene. The upshot is a particular view on sustainability as ‘dynamic stability’.
December, 5: Paula Andrea Nieto Hernandez (Erasmus University Rotterdam): A Concept of Law for Climate Adjudication
As public demands for climate action are increasingly being brought before courts, legal adjudication has become an important new space for the exercise of public reason amid the climate emergency. This phenomenon has primarily been studied with a focus on supporting new climate litigation initiatives. While valuable from a socio-legal perspective, these approaches have fallen short in providing insights into the significance of climate litigation for the adjudicative role of judges, the theories that guide that role, and the philosophical question of what this practice reveals about the nature of law. This paper aims to fill that scholarly gap by asking: What is the concept of law at work in climate adjudication?
In this paper, I argue that the concept of law at work in climate adjudication understands law as an argumentative practice. Theorizing law in these terms can account for the temporalities of climate adjudication, specifically, its forward- and backward-looking dimensions, as well as both the systemic and practice views of law present in climate cases. Defending law as an argumentative practice challenges the binary framing of climate adjudication as either “law as it is” or “law as it ought to be,” where the former represents the paradigm of what judges do and are supposed to do when they adjudicate, and the latter is treated as a set of scarecrows judges are meant to avoid. As I show, this framing results from transposing a distorted interpretation of the separation thesis in legal positivism into adjudication. This paper also proposes a new research programme that can support further inquiry into how judges argue as they navigate the climate justice inquiry, how to assess which argumentative practices are good, and ultimately how courts should decide these climate cases well.