ABSTRACT
Historical considerations are at the core of rectificatory justice. Achieving rectificatory justice requires repairing an injustice while acknowledging and giving normative significance to its sources, such as the actions that lead to that injustice. How could we achieve, then, rectificatory climate justice thusly conceived? Two main rectificatory justice principles have been proposed: the polluter pays principle (PPP) and the beneficiary pays principle (BPP). The BPP emerged in the literature on climate justice in response to certain objections raised against the PPP. This chapter focuses on two of these objections: the causation objection and the excusable ignorance objection. Defenders of the BPP have traditionally assumed that this principle is not vulnerable to those objections, which renders the BPP superior to the PPP. This chapter challenges this underlying assumption. The main argument of this chapter is that moving from the PPP to the BPP in response to any of these objections might be unjustified because the BPP is affected by at least some of the considerations giving rise to these objections. Hence, it concludes that there are no more reasons based on those objections to justify rectificatory justice on each of those principles. The main question is how to circumvent those objections.
