1 Climate Change and Commonsense Moral Responsibility Ryan Darr* Abstract The harms that will result from climate change are so spatiotemporally distant from and complexly related to the acts that cause them that the commonsense concept of moral responsibility can seem inadequate. For this reason, Dale Jamieson has raised the possibility that climate change might represent not simply a moral failure but a failure of morality itself. The result could be a climate disaster for which no one is morally responsible. Debates about the adequacy of commonsense morality, however, often rely on an overly simplistic picture of it. This essay proposes a more adequate picture of commonsense morality, which allows for both a more nuanced account of its role in the problem of climate change and a more satisfying account of individual moral responsibility for contributions to climate change. *Department of Religious Studies, Yale University, 451 College Ave., New Haven, CT 06511; email: ryan.darr@yale.edu. Darr works at the intersection of theological ethics and moral philosophy in both historical and contemporary perspective. His current research focuses on the relationship between individual moral agency and complex social outcomes. I. Introduction For over a half century scientists have been warning about the effect of human activity on the global climate system. Yet despite the long and growing scientific consensus about the dangers of climate change, we continue to flood the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. Most of the philosophical work on climate change has focused on developing and defending just – or at least plausible – solutions to the problem. As we continue to move rapidly down the path toward dangerously altering the climate, however, some philosophers have shifted their attention to understanding and explaining our continued failures. Since any proposed solution will presuppose some account of the problem, this is a crucial task. For several decades, Dale Jamieson has been a leading philosopher working to understand our failures. In a number of works over several decades, Jamieson has argued for two claims: first, the problem posed by climate change is irreducibly moral, and second,