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39 Law & Pol'y 412 (2017)
The Morality of Divestment

handle is hein.journals/lawpol39 and id is 412 raw text is: The Morality of Divestment JEREMY MOSS Divestment from companies that produce or heavily utilize fossil fuels has become one of the biggest issues in the contemporary moral debate surrounding climate change. Universities and other institutions are being asked to divest themselves of their fossilfuel-related investments. In this article I argue that, while the case for divestment is morally strong, not all of the arguments used to support divestment are equally strong. Moreover, which of these arguments is employed matters a great deal for the strength of the conclusions regarding divestment. There are two major groups of arguments: what I call positive arguments for divestment, which stem from the claim that divestment is a response to general duties to take action to prevent dangerous climate change, and what I call negative arguments, which stem from a duty not to cause harm. In this article I will briefly characterize what divestment means and to whom it applies. I will then look at negative and positive duty accounts of the duty to divest before looking at the standard objections to both. Objections have tended to cohere around the claims that divesting is inconsistent, useless and/or harmful, or should be abandoned for better options to avoid dangerous climate change. I. INTRODUCTION: DIVESTMENT AND CLIMATE JUSTICE Divestment from companies that produce or heavily utilize fossil fuels has become one of the biggest issues in the contemporary moral debate surrounding climate change. Pres- sured by student and civil society-based movements, universities and other institutions are being asked to divest themselves of fossil fuel-related investments. To date, there have been some very major institutions and funds that have begun to divest, the most notable being Norway's Government Pension Fund. Yet, predominantly it is nonstate actors who are providing the impetus for divestment, with many universities and civil society groups embracing it. There are many arguments for why institutions ought to divest. Some argue that we ought to divest for economic reasons, given that fossil fuel assets are likely to be worth much less in the future. Others argue that investing in fossil fuel companies is simply inconsistent with the values of some institutions such as universities. This is especially so where a university invests in a company that deliberately denies or supports deniers of many of the claims of the very climate scientists who work at that university (Frumhoff, Heede, and Oreskes 2015). This article benefitted from the comments received following presentations at the University of Tasmania and the Society of Applied Philosophy Conference in Belfast. I would like to thank Neil Gunningham for his insightful comments on a draft and Laura Kotevska for editing a draft. I would also like to thank the editors at Law and Policy for their very helpful comments as well as those of the two anonymous reviewers. Address correspondence to: Jeremy Moss, University of New South Wales, Practical Justice Initiative, Morven Brown Building, High St., Kensington, Sydney 2052, Australia. Telephone: 61 (2) 93852357; E-mail: j. moss@unsw.edu.au. LAW & POLICY, Vol. 39, No. 4, October 2017 ISSN 0265-8240 © 2017 The Author Law & Policy D 2017 The University of Denver/Colorado Seminary doi: 10.1111/lapo.12088

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