Date: 21 October 2026
Time: 10:00-11:45
Venue: Institute for Futures Studies, Holländargatan 13 in Stockholm or online
Research seminar with Göran Duus-Otterström, Professor of political science at the University of Gothenburg, as well as a researcher at the Institute for Futures Studies. Göran's research is in normative political theory. The bulk of his work can be divided into two categories: on the one hand, the justification of legal punishment, on the other hand, climate ethics and climate justice. Göran's work on punishment explores retributivism, particularly the concept of desert. Recently, he has also focused on the relationship between political legitimacy and the right to coerce. Göran's research on climate ethics is primarily on fair burden sharing, that is, how the costs of climate policy ought to be allocated between actors. He is the author (with Bengt Brülde) of the popular science book Klimatetik: Rättvisa, Politik och Individens Ansvar (Thales, 2015). Göran won the 2023 Brian Barry Prize in political science.
Abstract
People on the political right are often taken to be an obstacle in environmental politics and environmental policymaking. They tend to express lower environmental concern and are less likely to support ambitious environmental policies, particularly when it comes to climate change. Focusing on the ideology of political conservatism, this presentation stipulates that conservatives do have a distinctive reason to oppose ambitious climate policy. This is because such policy is likely to require far-reaching and sudden changes to the established social order, which is exactly the kind of intervention that political conservatives (rightly or wrongly) treat with suspicion. But the presentation then sets out an argument for why political conservatives nevertheless ought to support ambitious policy. The argument takes a lesser-evil form: the idea is that even though ambitious climate policies have detrimental effects on the established social order, the absence of such policies will have still worse effects, whether this is because of the impacts of unmitigated climate change on the social order or because of the necessity of truly radical policy interventions such as geoengineering. Hence, political conservatives ought to support things like deep decarbonization as a lesser evil. Having set out this argument, the presentation then discusses some objections. For example, don’t the dangers of climate change give political conservatives reason to support adaptation rather than mitigation? Finally, the presentation closes by examining how likely this argument is to convince actual political conservatives given what we know from research about the sources of their opposition.
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