Climate mitigation: Just, legitimate and hence politically feasible?

An emerging consensus among social scientists holds that climate mitigation policies should be just and legitimate, not only because justice and legitimacy are valuable moral ends but because they are vital to policies’ political feasibility. Yet, the view that justice and legitimacy enable political feasibility in climate mitigation stands in sharp contrast to the mainstream view within normative political theory, where political feasibility is usually treated as a constraint on the realization of values such as justice and legitimacy. This paper explains how these conflicting perspectives arise and offers a multifaceted account of the relation between moral values and political feasibility in climate mitigation. By analyzing three conceptual distinctions – normative versus sociological, transcendental versus comparative, and wide-scope versus narrow-scope approaches to justice/legitimacy – we show how justice/legitimacy tends to enable political feasibility under the latter understandings (sociological, comparative, and narrow-scope) but constrain it under the former (normative, transcendental, and wide-scope). This clarification dissolves the apparent disciplinary contradiction and reveals the conditions under which values central to climate mitigation align with or limit political feasibility.