The article chosen for review is Moral responsibility for environmental problems—Individual or institutional by Fahlquist (2009). According to the author, the actions performed by people, as citizens, entrepreneurs, and citizens have aggregate adverse consequences for the environment. The author concentrates on the question of to what margin is it reasonable to hold people and organizations responsible for environmental issues. A distinction is created between forward-looking and backward-looking responsibility. Initially, people were not viewed as being responsible or questionable for environmental issues, but an ideology is that is now explicitly and implicitly embraced in the public argument or debate on environmental issues is that people are suitable targets for blame when they conduct actions that are hazardous to the ecology (Hunecke et al., 2001). The article, however, criticizes this paper. The authors argue that instead of accusing people of conducting actions that are not ecological or environmental friendly we should assign the forward-looking duty to people, a notion or concept that concentrates more on resources and capacity than blameworthiness and causation. Likewise, it is crucial to emphasize that a vast share of forward-looking duty should also be assigned to governments, institutional agents and corporations. Moreover, the urge to ascribe or assign the forward-looking duty to institutional agents is inspired or motivated by the efficiency goal of responsibility distributions. Finally, the author argues that, if duty is assigned to corporations and government agents there is a greater chance of developing a society in which the opportunities and chances to act in a green or environmentally friendly way increase.
This article relates to my module 2 paper concerning an environmental disaster. This is because the Grupo Family operated on their own and assumed that the skilled workers would be responsible for every action of the company (Reuters, 2018). When the copper spills occurred, the workers did not know since they were on strike. Therefore, if the Grupo Mexico had assigned environmental responsibilities to government agents or cooperation, then the disaster would not have taken place.
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References
Fahlquist, J. N. (2009). Moral responsibility for environmental problems—Individual or institutional?. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 22 (2), 109-124.
Hunecke, M., Blöbaum, A., Matthies, E., & Höger, R. (2001). Responsibility and environment: Ecological norm orientation and external factors in the domain of travel mode choice behavior. Environment and Behavior, 33 (6), 830-852.
Reuters, (2018). Mexican Mining Spill Could Cost Grupo Mexico Millions-Agency. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/article/mexico-grupomexico/mexican-mining-spill-could- cost-grupo-mexico-millions-agency-idUSL1N0QW1SS20140826 http://geo- mexico.com/?tag=pollution
