Energy, capability, and justice: a foundation for a normative account of energy systems

Energy impacts our lives in a multitude of ways. Some of these impacts can drastically improve our lives, others can be detrimental to the things we value in life. In this thesis, I develop a space through which to connect energy to the things we value to better understand and articulate the impacts of energy systems.

To develop this space, I explored the ways through which we have commonly connected energy systems to the things we value and investigated the efficacy of more recent attempts to understand these connections through ideas of energy justice. To assess the efficacy of these approaches, I outlined the role moral and political philosophy can plausibly play in describing the things we value and their relations to energy systems. I found a substantial divergence between my own account of the role of moral and political theory in describing the impacts of energy systems and the uses of moral and political theory in existing approaches to energy justice. I argued this divergence limits the capacity of energy justice approaches to draw on moral and political philosophy to articulate and analyse the impacts of energy system in a meaningful way.

I produced a series of outputs which form a foundation for a viable account of energy justice. I developed a capabilities-based framework to articulate the impacts of energy consumption and production and the tensions between them. I outlined a pluralistic approach of testing the ability of different moral theories to reflect the dynamics underpinning energy dilemmas. I presented arguments detailing how trivalent conceptions of justice, which pre-date energy justice discourse, can form a viable basis for an account of energy justice. In concluding, I point towards future avenues of research, conceptual and procedural, through which to develop this foundation into a reflexive account of energy justice.