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This article argues that parents have a special, shared duty to organize for collective action on climate change mitigation and adaptation, but not for the reason one might assume. The apparently obvious reason is that climate change threatens life, health and community for the next generation, and parents have a special duty to their children to protect their basic human interests. This argument fails because many parents could protect their children from these central harms without taking more general action to combat climate change, let alone to mitigate it. Instead, subtler reasons are advanced, drawing on children's relational interests or on their interests as moral agents. It is argued that parents owe it to their children to combat climate change because of the indirect impact on current children of serious threats to their children and grandchildren, and of being required to live in a radically unjust world. It is further argued that parents may owe it directly to their more distant descendants to mitigate climate change because of the role current parents played in bringing them into the world.

This paper outlines a moral framework for the debate on global population policy. Questions of population, climate justice and global justice are morally inseparable and failure to address them as such has dangerous implications. Considerations of population lend additional urgency to existing collective duties to act on global poverty and climate change. Choice-providing procreative policies are a key part of that. However, even were we collectively to fulfil these duties, we would face morally hard choices over whether to introduce incentive-changing procreative policies. Thus, there is now no possible collective course of action which is not morally problematic.

Climate Change and the Moral Agent examines the moral foundations of climate change and makes a case for collective action on climate change by appealing to moralized collective self-interest, collective ability to aid, and an expanded understanding of collective responsibility for harm.