Brenna Barker-Lamb (3.30-4.30pm): Corrective Justice for Climate Refugees

Climate change could force over 140 million people to migrate by 2050. These ‘climate refugees’ will be people already in vulnerable positions who will suffer harm disproportionate to their contribution to climate change. My thesis will investigate what is owed to climate refugees and who owes it as a matter of corrective justice.

I divide the question by considering two cases; the populations of 'sinking island states', and those internally displaced within their own states. I argue that for both, states are the liable agent responsible for correcting injustice but what that entails differs because the harm caused in each case differs. Internally displaced climate refugees suffer myriad harms associated with displacement, but the populations of sinking island states are additionally harmed by the loss of political community.

I will propose solutions that fulfil requirements of corrective justice for each type of climate refugee as well as introduce various topics and issues that will be addressed in detail within the thesis.

Oliver Rawle (4.30-5.30pm): The Justifying/Requiring Distinction

I will introduce the justifying/requiring distinction, a view about weighing and comparing moral reasons upon which my PhD thesis will be based. Under this view, moral reasons can have two kinds of normative strength: justifying strength and requiring strength. These two kinds of strength play different roles in determining which actions are morally required, permissible, and impermissible. Furthermore, moral reasons can possess these two kinds of normative strength to divergent degrees. In my PhD thesis, I will use the justifying/requiring distinction to make progress on several problems in normative ethics. As an example, I will show how the distinction can be used to vindicate the Procreation Asymmetry – an intuitively compelling view about the ethics of bringing people into existence.