Security, Planning and Justice: A Reply to Mintz-Woo

摘要

In a recent paper (Herington, 2017), I argued that the mere risk of climate-related harm was itself a harm, since it undermined the security of individuals subject to that risk. In his commentary, Mintz-Woo (2019) argues that my account of the value of security is mistaken. On his view, the value of belief-relative security is already well captured by standard theories of wellbeing, and the value of fact-relative security is illusory. In the following, I attempt to respond to his concerns. First, I argue contrary to Mintz-Woo that the literature on the cognitive effect on poverty is relevant to an assessment of the value of belief-relative security. Second, I introduce a distinction between ex ante and ex post perspectives on justice, and show that straightforward prioritarian commitments motivate an ex ante concern for fact-relative security.